


Blind Owls

by animal



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Arranged Marriage, Amish-like culture, Arranged Marriage, Ben is 33, Ben is Reuben in this, F/M, Rey doesn’t want to be married but she has to, Rey is 19, Rey is Andrea, abandoned fields, big rivers and smaller ones, brief mentions of suicidal ideation, by a lake, by the mountains, elders choose who you marry, except it’s nothing like the Amish, fic should be short, fictional culture, fictional religion, highly harmful superstitions, in a village, living in the forest, marriage counseling provided by very old ladies, names borrowed and fictional names, no culture in particular identified, past death of a minor character in childbirth, past death of a newborn, pre or post-modern times, providing maximum hurt and promising maximum comfort, rehabilitation of someone who’s feared and resented by the community, shoot me if it’s over 40k, that man is touch-starved someone help him, that someone is Ben, typically when you’re still a teenager and to another teenager, unclear if this is a patriarchy or a matriarchy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:33:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 37,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25110181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/animal/pseuds/animal
Summary: After having informally ostracized him from the village for fifteen years, the elders decide Reuben will marry a second time.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 1033
Kudos: 1415





	1. Going home with a fish

When he spots the four-year-old on the other side of the Owls’ river, Reuben is sitting right by the water, his fishing rod resting on his thin jacket laid flat on a rock, an hour away from his cabin. The stream bed isn’t too wide and he can see her face clearly. 

He doesn’t recognize her; must be an offspring from another village. Children are often left to wander alone, and he sometimes happens to meet some on his way to the river or the mountain. Whether they’re raised in his own village or not, they’re not usually that young unaccompanied.

They know about him. The moment they see him, they typically run in the opposite direction. If there’s any sign their parents, aunts and uncles still talk about him to this day, this is it. 

This one doesn’t run, though. Too young to know. 

When she gets closer to the water, he doesn’t move. Her mother or father must not be too far behind, and if they catch him move toward her or talk to her…

Looking at that olive-skinned four-year-old child, he thinks about the time he found a lost boy crying under the weaver’s chicken coop. Reuben was only twenty-one at the time, and he brought the child back to his mother, who pointed her rifle at him as soon as her son let go of his hand. 

A white owl hoots above his head the way they normally do in the middle of the night. The sun is still high in the sky. 

The little girl takes a step closer, crouching, observing Light-knows-what under the water, her bare toes buried in the mud, her black braids swinging. The current isn’t too strong here, but it could take away a four-year-old, and further down the river, it gets stronger; strong enough to drown a man. It’d be easy for her to slip and fall. 

Reuben is sitting his elbows on his knees, holding one wrist in his hand. He’s wearing his long, high waisted pants as is tradition, his oldest pair, well too hot for the season. His shirt is lighter, and it used to be white. Sweat is running down his back, his brow. He watches her, but doesn’t move. 

He should pack his things and leave, pretend he never saw her. 

_ Where are her parents,  _ is what he wonders right as she slips. 

The river isn’t too deep where she falls, but children this age don’t have much balance. She manages to stand back up for a moment, her head above the surface, coughing up water, her small fingers spread wide in the air, reaching for the bank. But she slips on a soft rock again, yelping. The current takes her. 

Reuben’s past has kept him in the shadows for over fifteen years now. He’s thirty-three; that’s nearly half the time he’s been on earth. He’s no longer under any illusion regarding his future. All hope has been left behind a long time ago. 

But he doesn’t sit and watch when the water takes the child. As soon as she falls he’s already crossing the river with rapid strides. 

There and then, he can run faster than the river; but further down, the current is too strong, and he must throw himself into the water at the right time to catch the child, without losing sight of her. The heat is thick enough to slow him down; still all of it happens in a matter of seconds. 

His steps are well placed; he avoids thick roots snaking down the bank and rocks hidden in the mud like a mountain cat, then jumps. Any small misstep of any kind from him would have caused the girl to never leave the river again. He fists her collar and sharply pulls her back to him. Her small body lands hard on the bank. She coughs again, her tongue out. Once she’s done coughing, she starts crying. 

His heart hasn’t beaten so fast in a long time. Without taking the time to catch his breath, drenched from the waist down, he sets to take the child to another adult before she does something stupid again, his hand firmly closed around her arm. 

Crossing the river the opposite way, he doesn’t carry her in his arms, and simply tightens his hand above her elbow. The water reaches her torso. 

He gathers his jacket, his bag and his fishing rod in one hand, lips thinning thinking about having to go back home empty handed. And for what? 

Reuben catches the child’s arm again, and starts walking, heading south. 

“Brother… Bro-other,” the little girl hiccups, trying to keep up with his strides, her soaked skirts sticking to her little legs. When she doesn’t get his attention, she wails: “Where are you taking meeee?”

“Look,” she whines quietly later, “Look. Look.” He glances down at her even though he shouldn’t, and frowns when she pulls up her skirts to show him her bloody knee, sniffling, her chin trembling. 

He huffs and walks faster, pulling her with him.

She sobs with all her heart for a good while. “A da-a-ark spirit pu-u-shed me” she cries, her face wincing with distress -until eventually she’s done crying and falls quiet as a fish, exhausted, letting him lead the way through the forest; then through the wild fields, then the forest again, back to the village. Green fireflies dot the tall grass along the way. 

“Carry me on your back,” she does try at some point. He ignores her. 

When he passes the first cabin, north of the village, he picks up the pace, his eyes lowered, bracing himself for any possible sort of encounter. The child is flying by his side, her toes barely touching the grass.

But aside from crickets and frogs, the village is quiet, and he doesn’t meet anyone.

“What is your birth name?” He think the child asks, and oh, he won’t give it to her. If he’s lucky enough, no one will see him with her.

When he reaches Yili's cabin, he pulls the girl up in the air and drops her on the porch without climbing the stairs himself. 

The front door instantly swings open. He freezes. 

“Yiyi!” The girl squeals. 

Yili is wearing her sun-bleached apron, squinting her good-for-nothing eyes. She’s nearly blind, yet she asks with a voice rough with age: “Where did you find her?” -and he knows she knows it’s him. 

Before someone else has a chance to show up, he turns around and leaves, wincing when Yili raises her voice. 

“You can’t hide from me, you cursed child.”

She doesn’t go after him -and he gets to the end of the village without meeting anyone else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [O let them talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOIk6pA63o0)  
> While we lie in the grass  
> It flatters the world  
> Even if it won't last  
> Forgive me if I was too forward too fast  
> But not being yours would be wasteful


	2. The dark hour's son will take a second wife

Reuben’s cabin is a thirty-minute walk away from the village. 

He built it alone when he was twenty-one, but he’s changed many things about it since then. Still it’s a small, simple space that he can cross in a few strides, the roof just a couple inches above his head, with even a wall hiding the bed. Brown glass jars and bottles filled with food he preserves in olive oil, sugar or salted water are lined up on the floor against the wall, others are on the shelves. 

Outside, there’s a hut just wide enough for him to stand with his hands on his hips, where he keeps a bucket and a big cube of soap to wash. A square mirror about the size of a plate hangs there when he needs to shave, but he usually doesn’t use it for months at a time. 

The water comes from the well he’s also built alone, right by the clothes line and not too far from the greenhouse he’s set up there last year, to grow the more tender greens off season, the structure so modest that he can only enter it by bending at the waist.

More traditionally, husbands and wives build their home together, or are given one after they have their first born. 

Reuben hasn’t lived in the village in a long time. At night, he can no longer see the lamps glow through his neighbors’ windows. All he sees are the fireflies.

The night is dark when several strong knocks on his door startle him in the middle of his sewing. After leaving a four-year-old girl on the elder’s porch, he did expect a visit, but not so soon.

Whoever bothered to come this late, must mean to show this is serious matter.

His gas lamp in hand, he doesn’t delay opening the door, only to find Yili herself on the other side, her face old and her eyes unseeing. She’s still wearing her apron, her long white braid over her shoulder, her tanned face level with his ribs, short as she is. “Come to the temple at noon, Reuben.”

Then she immediately turns around to leave, without a lamp or someone’s arm to lean on. This is even more serious than he thought. 

“Can’t you speak to me now?” His voice is low from disuse; he hasn’t spoken to anyone in days. 

Without stopping or turning, she warns: “We stayed up well past supper because of you, you better be there boy, don’t make me come up here again.”

“ _We_?” 

Yili disappears in the dark between the trees. He’s not to follow her. 

One has to wonder what more could be taken from him for daring to come close to a young one. He figured he would have to go through the unpleasant experience of facing angry, aggressive parents, aunts and uncles at his door, forbidding him to ever approach the child again, but this? 

He doesn’t know what this means. 

What did the girl say happened? Did they encourage her to believe and claim he tried to drown her? What additional rules could they possibly impose on him? He hasn’t been allowed to participate to a Spring Mourning or a counsel in over ten years.

He slowly sits back in his chair. A long time ago, an incident like this would have caused him to panic and lose sleep. But he now knows solitude too well to worry. There’s not much left at all that could be taken from him. 

  
Either way, he doesn’t have a choice. 

At sunrise, he sets to do his chores like any other day.

First he feeds his eight chickens. Whatever pieces of stale bread he has, he lets them float and go soft in a bucket of water, then mashes them into a soup plate that he leaves in the grass in the middle of them. They sleep in a plain chicken coop behind the cabin.

When he gets there with the wet bread, they’re all waiting at the enclosure door, flapping their wings; he leaves it open so they can go scratch about in the dirt while it’s still humid. 

Then, he walks further into the forest to a square of soft dirt with a fence around it reaching his waist, to pick two small pepper bells he’s grown there with a few green onions. Just like any other day.

The bread he made three days ago is wrapped in a cotton towel, in the cupboard. He eats his breakfast on his porch, where there’s just enough room for him to sit in a chair. 

Despite his best effort, something will have to wait: he intended to climb the hill and pick some strawflowers, dry them to take them to the west side of the village at the end of the week, and give them in exchange of some flour. It’s a two hour-walk to get where they grow; he’ll have to do it tomorrow. 

This should be another day spent alone in his corner of the forest, but it doesn’t feel that way. From the moment he gets dressed, until he hangs his laundry near the well, he thinks about noon approaching. 

When the sun is high, he wipes his face with a wet rag and leaves. 

  
  


Cabins in the village are built where the forest allows it, not too far from one another. The temple, however, was always meant to be south, as south as can be, closer to the lake. Reuben hasn’t stepped inside it since his union to Wilo, fifteen years ago.

He doesn’t cross the village but goes around it; still, he meets Ari and his wife on the way there, going north, both with baskets on their arms, chatting together until they see him and fall silent, looking away.

He vaguely remembers the names of everyone but faces escape him, always turning away before he looks long enough. People he used to know as children are now his age, familiar eyes watching him when he’s not looking but never meeting his. They’ll say a lot behind his back but are never cruel to his face, or not anymore, and he’s learned to be satisfied with that. 

There’s no signs of life outside the temple except for the birds singing their mantra, and the white smoke silently dancing from the roof. It’s shelter bigger than any other in the village. The wood it was built with is of a much lighter brown than in his memories, and flowers are growing all around it now. 

There shouldn’t be too many people waiting for him inside. He still feels ill stepping closer to it. 

When he reaches the entrance, open as it should be, he stays there, and takes the sight in. 

The benches are the same, facing away from him like they used to, and the long table at the end of the temple is the same too. Yili is sitting there, facing the entrance, with Susu at her side, and eleven other men and women he can’t place right away, too overwhelmed by the colors on the walls. New, giant flowers have been painted there since he was last here, pink, white and green. Memories of his union with Wilo flood his mind’s eye, but he tries not to show it. 

“Let us know if you’ll come inside anytime soon.”

His heart is beating quite fast, he notices. Susu, he thinks, is the one who spoke just now. She wears a scarf to hide her hair, something she’s started to do only in recent years. 

His height, he knows, has always been intimidating, and his step has grown heavier with the years too. He hasn’t spoken yet and they all eye him as if his mere presence was an insult to their mothers.

A moment only is needed for him to walk up this aisle to them. He doesn’t recognize any of them, or only vaguely. It’s not important. He’s to stand there, with nowhere to hide while they sit and judge.

He doesn’t intend to correct them if they accuse him wrongly, there would be no point. His words hold no value to those people.

Yili doesn’t start with _hello_. She pushes a heavy sigh.

“The child says the river was taking her, and you pulled her from its arms.” 

Reuben doesn’t move or react in any way. 

Everyone else stays silent, face pinched, looking down at their hands, except for Yili and Susu. Susu doesn’t look happy to be here at all. 

“...You can’t speak?” Yili prompts, not losing any time. 

He looks back at her. 

“I can speak.”

“What river was it?”

“The Owls’ river.”

“She says a dark spirit pushed her.”

“She slipped. The bank was muddy.”

“You saw it happen?”

“Yes.” 

“What were you doing there?” 

“Fishing.”

“You said hello to her?”

“No.”

“You were on the same side of the river as her?”

Every answer he gives she barely listens to, let alone digest. The others look unsatisfied with whatever comes out of his mouth, regardless of what is said. The scene all but agrees with the feeling he had that he’d enter this temple as a formality: he’s sure now that a decision has been taken about him well before noon, if not last night.

“I was on the opposite side,” he still says.

“You called her, told her to cross the river?” 

“No I didn’t.”

“Why would she try to cross the river if you didn’t tell her to or call her?” 

“She wasn’t trying to cross the river. She slipped looking at the water.” 

Behind him, footsteps and two voices get closer from outside until they stop, he presumes somewhere near the entrance. He doesn’t turn around. Susu snarls: “Out!”

“We brought the last camelias---” one voice says. 

“I don’t care,” Susu shoots back. 

“What is _he_ doing here? Yili? ...What is-”

Susu stands suddenly, furious. She visibly softens and sits back down when the disruptors probably hurry to leave. To Yili, it’s as if nothing happened, and she resumes her questions.

“The Owls’ river. That’s quite far away from here.”

“It’s an hour away,” Reuben only says, as fact, careful not to express any opinion about anything. 

“You mean to have us think a four-year-old walked all the way there by herself?”

“I don’t know that.” 

“How did she get there?” Yili insists.

“I wouldn’t know, I didn’t take her there.”

The woman takes a moment, then sighs again. “What d’you say to her when you saw her?”

“Nothing, I already said.” 

“When she saw you, what did she say to you?”

“Nothing, she didn’t see me.” 

“So she _slipped_. What did you do to get her out?” 

“I ran across the river, then along it. I jumped into the water and grabbed her collar.”

“Not her arm?”

“No, I caught her collar.” 

“Why not her arm?”

His lips thin but he tries not to let it get to him. 

“I didn’t stop to choose, I had to act quickly.”

“Why is it your instinct to pull on a child’s collar rather than her arm?”

Yili is met with silence this time. No point in answering. 

“...and then what happened?” She probes. 

“I dragged her out of the water.”

“And then what happened?”

“I pulled her by the _arm,”_ he pauses, pointedly, “---led her back to the village and left her on your porch.”

“Mmh.”

It’s Susu’s turn to sigh, rolling her eyes. Still no one else comments on anything he says but Yili. 

“What did you say to her on your way here?” She asks again.

“Nothing.” 

“Was she crying?”

“Yes.”

“What did you say to comfort her?”

“I said I didn’t speak to her.” He keeps from gritting his teeth too obviously. 

Yili purses her lips. A short silence follows.

“Alright”, she grunts then with an air of finality. He _knew_ this would be brief, and pointless. They all look at him with expressions of evident distrust, so he looks down, waiting to know what this was all for. 

“I predicted years ago this would happen,” Yili speaks louder, as if to make some sort of announcement. “I said to several of you the dark hour’s son would give a life back to us, and he did.”

He winces. 

His father used to call him Ben. 

Now Yili’s tone is flat, expeditious: “After a long sleepless night that isn’t fit for my age, it is now my decision that Reuben, Han and Leia’s son, will take a second wife.”

Reuben goes very, _very_ still. 

What did she just say? He _must_ have misheard. 

With a slow, silent exhale, he risks a glance at his judges.

One woman on Yili’s left looks like her tongue has turned sour -but otherwise no one says a word. 

_What is happening?_

Yili continues, sounding just as bored as before: 

“Witnesses are Leli, Tahmele, Susu; _the light in our hearts will help us see, born with it, blind without it etc_ ; husband and wife will be introduced to each other in three days; the union will take place the next day at noon, get out of my temple.”

As soon as she says so, they all stand up, mumbling, not sparing him a look. The entire seance must have lasted a total of five minutes. 

“Three days?” Reuben murmurs to himself. 

He stands there, unable to move.

Somehow it all only feels real when Susu concludes, huffing as she gets up to leave with the others:

“You’ll take responsibility for that one, you stupid old cow.”

  
  


Yili knows this is directed at her. The elder sighs one last time, tired.

  
  


“...Eat my shit, Susu.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ and I need to feel love  
>  and I need to feel part of something  
>  is that strange?  
>  and why are they reluctant to talk and why do they look alone when they walk?  
>  I see a face but no names  
>  but despite my confusion  
>  I've come to the conclusion  
>  that people  
>  need people](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV2Ipe6mU90)


	3. Spirits clinging to his back

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m an asshole and therefore I forgot to let you know the most perfect moodboards exist for this fic, courtesy from two Lovely(™) people in this fandom,  
> [@zara_ardis](https://twitter.com/zara_ardis/status/1280544522468876288) and [@ririhsolo](https://twitter.com/ririhsolo/status/1281611329510322178)  
> on twitter. Don’t hesitate to give them love!
> 
> I read every comment, and I'm beyond touched; thank you all *so much* for reading.

  
  


Reuben and Wilo are both fifteen years old when they get married.

Wilo is a difficult girl with her parents, aunts and uncles, but not with Reuben. She loves him, and she wants to fuck him all the time. He shares his bed with her well before the elders make their union official. 

Wilo’s grandfather died earlier the same year, and they’re given his cabin to make a home for themselves. 

If the elders decide it is needed, when the spouses are so young, or when they’re suspected to be of a reckless temperament, like Wilo is, an elder or trusted member of the community will sit privately with the couple every few days during the months following the union, in case there is bickering, sexual dissatisfaction, or incompatible tastes regarding the organization of the home or the cooking. 

Reuben and Wilo don’t experience any of those disagreements but he wants to go anyway. Once a week, they ask Tahmele for guidance on how to play their parts.

Taking care of your spouse and your home is  _ doing the community right _ ; all children are taught this when they grow up, and at fifteen Reuben dreams of nothing else but being a good husband to his wife and a good father to his child. 

Wilo should have been pregnant within the first year, considering the time they spend in bed, but neither of them are bothered by the delay. After two years of marriage however, Susu, the village’s healer, gives Wilo dried flowers and plants to dip in hot water and drink every morning. A few weeks later, Wilo’s breasts swell, and her belly grows for the first time. 

The day Wilo is on all four on the bed, panting, ready to give birth, the sun is setting, and Reuben knows what to do. 

Every children in the village is taught how to assist during childbirth, and it is primarily a husband’s job to assure it goes smoothly, and everyone else’s responsibility in the community to be of help if needed.

Reuben is briefly concerned that his wife will be overwhelmed with fear, but the birth lasts a total of thirty minutes, he’s not left the time to worry much if at all. All of it happens without the slightest complication. Wilo’s eyelids are heavy, but she keeps them open on what Reuben shows her. 

The baby is small, unusually quiet for a newborn, eyes rolling back and forth. They’ve been chosen. It’s a girl. 

Reuben notices Wilo is bleeding an odd amount when he puts the child in her basket on the floor. 

Her lips are paler than a minute before. When he pulls the blanket from under her thighs, he feels his own blood drains from his face at the sight before him, and he runs out of the cabin to go find Susu. But there’s nothing she can do.

Wilo bleeds out and dies within minutes. The baby follows her soon after; it simply stops breathing. 

Reuben stares at the unfocused eyes of his wife while Susu massages his daughter’s torso; but the child, purple, doesn’t respond. 

From there, bits and pieces are missing from his mind. One moment, he’s alone, sitting by the bed where is lying his wife, the next people have entered the room and are standing around him. 

First it’s quiet, then not so quiet. They all have questions, and Susu tries to answer them, but it’s quickly apparent that they’re not listening, because they’ve already filled in the blanks themselves. Reuben cannot keep track with what they say. Susu tries to raise her voice above theirs; she shows Wilo’s blanket, then the baby, but all words have lost their meanings. 

He doesn’t remember walking from his cabin to another, yet he later finds himself alone in the dark, in Susu’s home, waiting there, he doesn’t know for what. 

If one dies before they could give their spouse a child, like it’s happened very few times, a second marriage is arranged for the widow or widower. Although one cannot refuse the spouse chosen for them, the counsel and the two concerned families cannot do more than  _ encourage _ the couple to bring a new life to the village. If a spouse refuses to lie in bed with the other, the union is broken and the elders are to seek out a more appropriate match, in the same village or another. 

A healthy body capable of giving life is  _ not _ to be wasted because of incompatible tempers or an unfortunate event. In any other circumstances, Reuben would be given the time to mourn his wife and child, then matched with another woman to build a home with. It’s the most sensible and common decision to expect from the elders. But his case is different. 

A woman’s life is more precious to the Light than a man’s. Daughters are counted and a great number of them in one family is evidence of a home being chosen, favored by light forces to pass on Life. 

It’s unaware of this that Reuben comes into the world a boy, while his mother, Leia, dies giving birth to him. 

No one holds it against him then, when they easily could: at least a life is given in exchange of the one taken, even if the first isn’t worth the second. His father Han bears the guilt, but raising his son  _ right _ soon make people forget about the painful outcome of his birth. 

Han tells his son about Leia once, when he turns thirteen --then never mentions her again. 

Leia’s death has been long forgiven, but with Wilo dying the same way, and Reuben’s daughter dying inexplicably moments after being born, alive not long enough to have a name, people look at the scene with a very different eye. 

None of the women and girl bound to Reuben survived him. The loss is too great to overlook. 

So-called  _ brothers, sisters _ , uncles and aunts all fight for Yili’s attention in the temple, after Reuben is dragged there in the morning, having not slept at all. 

They move like bees with fear and anger, pointing at him as he sits in the middle of them, waiting for Yili’s decision, unable to speak or move. 

Han has followed the crowd to try to defend him, and during this unplanned counsel, he stammers that his son is a good child -but his weak attempts and reassurances don’t do much to temper everyone’s angry grief, especially not Wilo’s parents’, who both hiss vicious insults through their tears at the boy who killed their daughter, demanding that he not be permitted to attend her funeral. 

It is also decided that he will never be a husband or a father again, to anyone else.

Yili is about Reuben’s height when he’s sitting, old and small. She holds all the power, yet none at all against their anger. Not yet blind at the time, she still can’t look at him and is quiet for a long moment while they all raises their voices.

Yili ends up agreeing to their terms, and asks that Reuben return to his cabin; that he at least be left to mourn his wife in peace, if alone. 

The next day at noon, they push Wilo on the lake in her bed of flowers, her child in her arms. 

Reuben is sitting on the bed she died in while it happens. It’s a sunny day.

When he dares to leave the cabin, several days later, an eighteen-year-old who’s aged twice as much in a single week, afraid to go anywhere near Wilo’s parents’ cabin, he doesn’t expect anyone to be friendly with him, or even respectful; but being still young and naive, he  _ is  _ hopeful that people will eventually move on. They don’t. 

Boys and girls he grew up with, uncles and aunts who had made of him an example to follow for the younger ones, now pull children away from him, and ask him to understand that they can’t let him inside the temple anymore because  _ dark spirits are clinging to his back.  _

He soon finds out he’ll only be in charge of tasks others don’t want to be in charge of from now on, like cutting and carrying wood all day long, or fishing and gutting fishes -at least until he’s forbidden to touch any food that isn’t meant for him. 

Some days, he tries to strike up a conversation with whoever has to be near him for longer than a minute. After many attempts, he stops trying. 

At night, he thinks about Wilo and cries quiet apologies to her into his pillow. People’s minds are clouded by old beliefs, he repeats himself. One day they’ll understand that he loved her. 

Months pass, years pass, and Reuben is no longer allowed to attend Spring Mournings, collective prayers, counsels. He leaves his cabin less and less during the day, avoids the others as much as they avoid him, and often wonders if dark spirits aren’t clinging to his back after all. 

He’s never explicitly told not to attend unions; there’s no need. People, with the exception of his father, stop addressing him by his birth name. They get creative. 

Children are fed tales, stories inspired by his habits, explaining why he only leaves his cabin at night, why he walks alone, all meant to deter them from ever approaching him or his cabin. All of them spread to the neighboring villages.

A little boy he doesn’t recognize once calls him the  _ Soul-eating owl _ . Parents aren’t any less inspired; they call him the dark hour’s son, the midnight spirit, the black bear. 

Dimly at first, then increasingly more each year, he’s aware of how those stories people tell aren’t only about him; how isolated his father has become, since Wilo’s death; how being tied to him has led people to distrust him as well.

So with time, Reuben holds back from visiting Han as often as he used to. Eventually, he simply stops visiting him. 

Anger ebbs in the village, but the  _ fear --- _ their fear of him only grows every quiet night. 

Reuben is not told to leave the village, but one day, he does, to build another cabin deeper into the forest. No one goes looking for him. 

On his own, away from the staring and the whispers, he gives himself to quiet, physical efforts, failed attempts to live with dignity. 

He spends his days building and fixing small boats, well enough that the villagers don’t mind him doing it, as long as Yili sings prayers to rid the boats of any dark force before anyone gets into them. The trees he cuts down alone, and he shapes the wood alone. He builds himself a well. He fishes. 

He grows lettuces, zucchinis, onions, potatoes, depending the season. He picks fruits in the forest and on the hill when they’re ripe, washes them, cuts them and puts them in jars for the winter. 

While doing his chores, he mumbles, mouths thoughts to himself, a scary mannerism that becomes harder to shake with time. 

While fishing or walking, he sometimes whips his head around, feeling observed, but no one is ever there. He murmurs praises to his plants when they grow well, to his chickens when they lay eggs, to the fox when the animal gets close enough to eat a piece of bread from his hand. 

Lying in the grass eyes closed, the sun shining through the leaves above his head, he lets insects walk over his face and the wind blow in his hair. It reminds him of how Wilo used to touch him, tracing his brow, his nose with the pad of her thumb, and often, he can’t help crying at the memory.

In his bed when he can’t sleep, he speculates about how many days it’d take for Yili to send someone to see if he’s alive or dead, thirty minutes away from them. 

Then he wonders if they’d bother pushing his body on the lake, or if they’d let him rot at the foot of a tree inside the forest for the black spirits to eat his soul. 

He feels them, the black spirits, clinging to his back, waiting for him to fall. His steps grow heavier as time goes by, his size, width and weight inspiring people to craft new tales about him when they catch sight of him in the village. It becomes a rare, rare sight for them. Reuben only goes there when he absolutely cannot avoid it. 

The amount of time he spends by himself, and the prospect of spending the rest of his life this way has him dreaming about walking into the lake himself where Wilo rests, to follow her and float back into her arms. 

One evening, a man is sent to his cabin to let him know Han died, and that the funeral took place three days before. 

The heartache his father’s death brings is so strong Reuben drives himself sick over it. 

For several weeks, he cannot sleep or eat. He closes his eyes at night in the hope that his father will speak to him, but he hears nothing. 

  
  


Like everything else, he simply has to go through it alone. 

  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Again I lost my strength completely, oh be near me tired old mare](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsGODTySH0E)  
> With the wind in your hair  
> Amethyst and flowers on the table, is it real or a fable?  
> Well I suppose a friend is a friend  
> And we all know how this will end


	4. A promise and a gift

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once more, please give [zara_ardis on twitter](https://twitter.com/zara_ardis/status/1286815320720601088) and [Lapinrose on twitter (and ao3!! check out her fic, I recommend it all the time)](https://twitter.com/ao3animal/status/1288903344451444741) all the love they deserve for making two more moodboards for this story... I don't deserve them. 
> 
> Thank you all for everything you've had to say about this story in the comments, I can't stress enough how happy you make me.

Husband and wife most commonly meet an entire week before their union,  _ if _ they haven’t met. Many times, they’re inseparable well before anyone decide they'll marry each other. 

Elders never fight an affection born naturally between two souls, and with young people being eager to play their part, more often than not regardless of who they do it with, a match is rarely hard to make. The two families, the elders and the community are all expected to guide young couples who show signs of frustration during their first obstacles, if there are any.

Refusal to lie with your spouse is the only  _ disagreement _ that can be ground for separation; however separation will only be allowed  _ at the request of the rejected spouse. _

Everything is done to solve whatever is at the source of the rejection, and if it can’t be helped despite the families and elders’ meddling, the union is broken by the elder who formed it. 

Separations have been so rare that they’re considered to be oddities; marriages are to hold  _ no matter what _ , but everyone knows about that one exception -including Reuben. 

Because of it, Reuben knows that whether or not his wife-to-be lies with him, his tie to her won’t be broken if he doesn’t want it to be, and this is all he thinks about during the three days he has left before meeting her. 

Although he can’t pretend to the privilege of having his questions answered, he still asks Yili about the wife she’s chosen for him, when they’re both out of the temple and away from the others -but all she says before dismissing him with a wave of her hand is that his second wife is from the smaller village all the way south on the other side of the lake, that herself has never met her and he’ll _ know about her soon enough _ . 

All of this naturally keeps him up at night, and leaves him with hardly any appetite.

In the early morning hours of the day he’s meant to meet her, there is only one thing Reuben is certain of, and it is that he cannot afford to reject that woman, no matter her looks, attitude or tastes, when this marriage could mean he’ll be accepted back among those who used to be his people. 

He was never meant to get a second chance; and although nothing terrifies him more than cause another woman to be with child, he’ll lie with her if she wants him to. If she refuses him, he’ll gladly allow it and keep her, as long as a marriage is enough to be allowed to die in the village he was born in. 

To not die alone, like his father did.

Whoever she is, the decision to marry them was as easily made as snapping one’s fingers; surely it was made before the counsel, maybe even before he saved that four-year-old from drowning. 

Reuben would like it to not be so, but he suspects he’s a punishment of some sort, even if it’s unclear to him why someone would be punished that way. To anyone who still believes he’s cursed, sending a woman in bed with him would be like sending her to death. 

Another possibility is that no one wants her. 

That morning, Reuben performs the same plain routine he has for years, his spirit floating out of his body, faintly buzzing with doubt and unease ever since Yili has announced he would marry again.

_ She could be missing a limb _ , he speculates, tying his pants on. Folks from every village say a missing limb is the sign of a dark spirit feeding on you. This alone could be enough to explain why she has to marry  _ him. _

At noon, he’s sitting on one of Yili’s straw chairs. 

It’s a hot day, and inside the main room of her cabin, it’s humid and hot too. He’s facing a low stool where she placed five round wooden cups and a teapot in the middle, already filled. 

There is only Susu sitting next to him, her scarf tightly covering her hair, dead silent as they wait for Yili to return with their guests: his wife-to-be, and the elder coming with her as a chaperon.

Reuben’s shoulders are tense no matter how much he tries to relax them, his eyes fixed on the stool. Wilo’s parents had prepared a feast for this same ritual fifteen years ago. 

He’s cleaned and organized his  _ home _ as best as he could, but the result is lacking. For the first time since he’s built that cabin he’s looked at it with a stranger’s eyes, and it’s glaringly obvious how inadequate it is for a couple, let alone a family. If he’s lucky and his  _ wife _ is simple enough, she might not hate it for now. 

He put his best clothes on, even if it’s not saying much; he also intended to shave, then thought better of it, and he refrained from putting white camellias in his hair... It’s another custom that wouldn’t make sense for him to honor in his situation. 

Distantly, he traces his collar, looking down. 

He’ll be married tomorrow and his bed isn’t big enough for two.

After sitting in silence for nearly an hour, they hear Yili’s voice from outside get closer to the cabin. 

From where Reuben and Susu are sitting, they can’t see the front door when it suddenly opens. Reuben clenches his fists on his knees, and he keeps his eyes down while Susu barely stirs on her chair. 

Yili enters the room first. A woman older than her shuffles after her, chewing on her lower lip, her head shaved -then a much, much younger one comes in last. He lowers his eyes again. She’s not missing a limb. 

A wheat color dress reaches her ankles, and two long braids reach the middle of her back. The most traditional clothing and braiding. There are no flowers in her hair either. Her brow and her mouth remain perfectly even when she sees him. 

Reuben is too big to hide; big next to Susu, much bigger than the boy who should have married her instead. 

Trapped, he doesn’t move as the three of them sit across from him, with her in the middle. For tradition’s sake, Yili immediately starts serving every cup, but no one moves to drink. 

The bald headed elder takes a slow breath in, then speaks first above the cold tea pouring. 

“Susu,” is all she says before Susu cuts her off with pinched lips and a flat voice: “You took your time.”

“I wasn’t in a hurry to see you,” the other one replies just as dispassionately. 

“Nice hair.”

The bald woman ignores that and turns to Yili. “No bread?” 

Yili arches an eyebrow. “No bread. My apologies,” she says, not meaning it.

No  _ hellos  _ or  _ welcomes _ . His bride sits with her hands folded on her lap, her face blank, most unbothered by the absence of bread.

Everyone wants this to be over, he sees.

To keep from squirming like a boy on his chair, he cautiously leans forward and reaches for the small cup.

“Selma,” Yili prompts with a meaningful look to the strange elder, trying to get this going. 

Selma smacks her lips. “Andrea is nineteen years old.”

So this is what she chooses to start with. Reuben furtively checks  _ Andrea _ ’s impassive face. He thought so. She doesn’t look quite as young as he was for his first marriage. In another life, he would have had a say in this and asked for a woman of an age closer to his. 

All he thinks about hearing how young she is is how old Wilo would have been today. 

Susu seems to find humor in Selma’s opening. “ _ Our dear Reuben will know his thirty-third summer this year. _ ”

Reuben takes another sip to hide behind his cup, right as Selma adds, as if Susu hadn’t spoken: 

“This is Andrea’s thirteenth union.”

Tea goes through his nose right then, and he starts coughing, interrupting the introductions. He tries to be quick and catch his breath, but everyone turns to him, except Andrea, who sits still. 

When able to take a deep breath in, he blinks, his eyes wet, putting his cup down with the intention to not drink from it again.

“Did you say  _ thirteenth _ ?” Susu asks when it’s quiet once more. 

Andrea keeps looking right ahead at the wall behind him. 

Selma is annoyed now. “That is what I said.” 

“I thought Reuben would be number twelve.” 

“No.” Andrea’s elder opens her mouth to keep going, but Susu isn’t done: “Are they well?” 

“ _ Who _ ?”

“The husbands.”

“Yes. All married now,  _ to good wives _ .”

Reuben swallows. 

Well now he knows. 

With so many husbands since Andrea was probably fourteen, he might very well be the only one to not have heard of her. 

No matter how well known her reputation is however, it can only pale in comparison with his own. Susu doesn’t mention that this is his second union, because there’s no need to. 

Yet, considering how unmoved Andrea seems by all of this, one would think she’s never heard of his story. He can’t say if this is a welcomed attitude or if he should be wary. 

For a moment, Selma goes through a few platitudes about marriage, as is expected of her, but he’s not listening until Susu interrupts her once again. 

“Where are the parents?”

Again, it’s clear to everyone that she means Andrea’s parents and not his. 

“Her parents have stopped coming after the seventh union”, Selma plainly reveals, without a care for how this sounds. With a half-hearted shrug, she adds: “You’ll meet them eventually… if the marriage holds.”

The word  _ never  _ hangs unspoken in the air, if Yili’s frown is anything to go by. 

“You’ve said to us she’s not a split spirit.” It’s not a question, but Susu apparently needs Selma to confirm it again. 

_ Split spirits _ , where Reuben grew up, are women whose affection grow for women, men whose affection grow for men. In other villages, the name is more broadly given to children whose physiques, behaviors and tastes don’t match either traditional roles or appearances.

Either way, those people who can’t marry the way it’s commonly done are considered to be one half of a spirit in search of the second half, and elders are  _ not _ to interfere in their search. 

In Andrea’s case, her being a split spirit would explain a lot, but Selma replies with the tone of someone who’s been asked this many, many times.

“I sure have,” she says, and what Reuben hears is  _ I wish she was.  _ “She told us she was one when she was twelve, and we found out that was a lie.”

It’s said as if Andrea wasn’t there, sitting right next to her -which is fitting, as Andrea is very much acting as if no one had spoken. 

Reuben gets the sense that they won’t know more about this, but he imagines a young girl running after boys, kissing them and sleeping in their beds in secret while claiming she’s a split spirit. 

“Reuben,” Selma addresses him for the first time, and his hands ball into fists again. “Andrea knows how to write and read.”

Yili, Susu and Selma all look at him expectantly. 

_ Oh. _

He clears his throat, caught off guard: this is intended for him to show appreciation, but words don’t come.  _ She can write and read.  _ One can maybe count on two hands the number of people who write and read in each village. 

“That’s…”  _ Not something I can do. Useless. A loss of time.  _ “...nice.” 

Yili arches an eyebrow again; his  _ appreciation _ is clearly underwhelming. 

Andrea doesn’t react anymore than she has to anything that has been said up until now. 

Susu purses her lips, he realizes because she now must speak for  _ his  _ qualities. He bites the inside of his cheek, his chin in, while Yili and Selma turn to her. 

“Andrea,” Susu starts, then stays silent for a long moment -before going for lukewarm facts. 

“Reuben… has built and repaired many of the boats you saw at the lake.”

He risks another glance at his wife-to-be, and for the first time since she’s sat down, Andrea is looking back at him this time,  _ directly _ at him.

She cocks her head with a tight smile. 

“ _ That’s nice. _ ”

Chastened, his face heats up while Yili breathes out a long, tired sigh. 

“Promise yourselves to each other,” Susu prompts, “we don’t need to drag this out. Reuben.”

His face burns all the more at that: he forgot about this. One brief, simple assurance to their future spouse must be said aloud, in front of the elders. Like the rest, it’s more a formality than anything else, but he wishes he had thought about it because his mind is blank. 

“I promise to---” He stops there, at a loss for words, before he lamely finishes: “--be kind.”

_ And to cook well _ , he nearly adds, self-conscious, mouthing it as Susu speaks over him: “ _ Kind,  _ how sensible. What about you?” she says turning to Andrea, not wasting another minute. 

Andrea takes a deep breath, suddenly coming to life, her back straight, pausing before speaking. 

“I, promise to... not be a bother.”

“Thank you,” Susu concludes, too soon, because Andrea adds: “Ever.”

“Yes--”

Andrea meets his eyes, and he doesn’t move, like a caught prey: “I will make sure to leave him alone when he most needs to.”

“ _ Rey _ ,” Selma warns, but Andrea keeps going: “...which is at night. I promise to never, ever,  _ ever  _ disturb his sleep.” She blinks at her elder, suddenly all coy. “...A well-rested husband is a good husband.”

The message has been received, and although Reuben feels a pang in his chest at her rejection, instead of the indifference he thought her opinion of him would inspire, he’s not as affected by her words as Yili is. 

The woman is  _ not  _ amused in the slightest. 

“Let one thing be clear here and now, before any of us proceed with the rest: you will both sit with us every eight days, for as long as I decide you do.”

“Who’s  _ us _ ?” Susu huffs, but Yili ignores her. 

“...If you ever have the ill-advised idea to not come here on the days it is required you do, I will curse you both, your families, your unborn children and their children as well. Do not think of coming in this village in bad faith, or I’ll make sure you don’t come back here again  _ ever _ . I hope my feelings about this union have been clearly conveyed.”

It’s dead silent again in the cabin. Andrea lifts her chin up, but doesn’t say anything. Even Susu is quiet.

“Give yourselves to each other, hurry.”

This, Reuben didn’t forget, thank light. This always ends with the couple giving each other what is supposed to be small tokens of their affection. 

There is no affection here, but it’ll have to be done all the same. 

With the mood of someone who’s had to do this twelve times, Andrea reaches inside the pocket of her dress, and pulls out a folded piece of paper, that she drops on Selma’s lap, before looking away. 

Selma rolls her eyes, takes it and gives it to Yili, who gives it to Reuben.

Carefully, he unfolds it, sure to find the drawing of a flower or a fish, but no. He can’t make out what it is, because the curves are forming  _ words _ , and he can’t read. This could be a poem, or a list; he’ll never know unless he asks someone who reads. 

“Thank you,” he murmurs anyway, folding the paper to keep it in his pocket, before showing her gift. 

It’s an off-white square of fabric, that he’s used to embroider a camellia and a few leaves, of about the same colors and shapes than the ones he embroidered for Wilo a long time ago.

Still looking away, Andrea doesn’t unfold it to look at it when Selma puts it in her hand, but hides it in her pocket without a word. 

When they finally leave the cabin, the air outside cooler on their faces, Reuben breathes out a silent sigh. 

Now standing, Andrea appears much smaller by his side, a child _ ,  _ and himself feels less like one. His reprieve is short-lived, because he sees Matthew and Osara are on their porch, watching them all exit Yili’s cabin together with concerned frowns. 

Osara is hugging herself, the most upset of the two, and he hears her say to no one: “I knew it.” 

Reuben dips his head. 

Matthew is leaning against the stair rail: “Do you have happy news to give us, Yili?” It sounds like a warning, but Yili is unbothered. 

“Hush.”

Following Yili, if he really must walk Selma and Andrea back to the lake with her and Susu, and because he knows in his flesh how it’s done and that he doesn’t want to be seen trailing behind those women like he doesn’t belong with them, isn’t meant to be walking with them, Reuben instinctively goes to take Andrea’s hand, against his better judgement. 

She instantly removes it from his hold, hiding it away from him without a glance or word.

He lowers his eyes, trying to fight a fresh wave of humiliation. He doesn’t look up to see if Osara and her husband have caught that. 

Andrea keeps walking, clearly indifferent to who’s watching. 

  
  
  


Tomorrow, he’ll be married to her. 

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [I haven't known any other boys,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxnX23_494U)  
> If I have I don't remember them  
> Why would I ever compare  
> My heart knows when it's right


	5. White smoke

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Everyone look at this moodboard by Ana! Some of you really elevate the craft :’)](https://twitter.com/twbyana/status/1292657264436928512)

Not five days ago, Reuben was only allowed around the village to get supplies, or to work on a boat, at agreed upon times, and on the condition that he wouldn’t cross the village but skirt around it. 

Since then, for the first time in years, he’s walked into the temple, into Yili’s house, and he’s crossed the village twice. What he wonders, is how long it will take him to be able to walk with his guard down. 

At first light on the day of his second marriage, Reuben stands in front of the small mirror hanging on the wall of the hut outside his cabin. He combs and trims his mustache and his beard, then combs his hair. 

If he had any reason to dispute this union, he’d have no authority to prevent it from happening. No one does, except the elders; and if his wife doesn’t let him bed her, Reuben is set on keeping her. He has nothing to lose and everything to hope for in marrying her. 

He ties his pants neatly around his waist, fixes his collar, and he’s on his way. 

Unions are traditionally celebrated at noon, in presence of most of the village, eight days after the tea ceremony. Today however, the ritual will be rushed, performed at dawn. 

The sky is still pink when Reuben reaches the village. He goes around it until he’s south, where the temple is. 

When he gets there Susu is sitting on the ground by the entrance, smoking her pipe, wearing around her head what must be the first scarf she found this morning, and not the white one he’s seen her wear for every marriage since he was a boy. Once more, they have to wait for Yili, Selma and Andrea. 

“Should I hide inside?” Reuben asks Susu when he notices a silhouette in the distance. He can’t make out who it is, can’t even be sure they’ve looked his way, but the silhouette pauses by Jeremiah’s cabin, before turning around. 

“Why? ...They’ll all have to know eventually,” Susu sighs, smoke pouring out of her mouth. 

He crouches next to her, facing the lake. He soon imagines Wilo lying in a bed of flowers, and looks away from the water. 

Reuben remembers building the boat they arrive in. Yili and Selma are at the front, Selma scratching her shaved head and squinting her eyes. _Andrea_ is sitting her back straight, away from him. A fourth woman he doesn’t recognize is paddling.

Reuben stands up when he sees them, and hides behind the white smoke curling from Susu’s pipe. 

On the shore, Selma and Yili exchange a few words out of earshot. A basket filled with white flowers is on Andrea’s arm. Reuben takes a deep breath when they start walking toward the temple.

Andrea put on a brown dress, collar tight around her neck, long sleeves; the skirt reach her ankles, her hair is split in two long braids. All is as expected. This is most probably the dress she wore for her twelve previous marriages. 

She doesn’t look at him. Not when she’s facing him as she follows the two elders to the entrance, not as they go inside, and not when they’re standing next to each other before the white circle.

Yili stands at the heart of the circle, the basket at her feet, while Susu and Selma go sit on the bench behind her, against the wall. The presence of five elders is commonly needed for a marriage. Reuben remembers Tahmele was expected to be a witness, and he wonders if her absence should worry him. 

He’s wary, but still curious. Trying to not let that curiosity show too much, he glances sideways only when it can be done discreetly. 

Andrea’s mouth is set, her eyes disinterested, and her hair was braided with just enough care to not insult Yili.

As long as her nose doesn’t frown in transparent disdain at his sight, he’ll consider himself not too unlucky. 

“Kneel.”

They both kneel in front of Yili as she selects flowers from the basket, Reuben still barely shorter than her. The four flowers she chooses are as large as her hand, picked this morning before sunrise in Selma’s garden.

She pins the first one under Andrea’s left ear, on a fold of her braid, then a second one on the other braid. Then, she pins two flowers on Reuben’s vest, one on each shoulder. 

She then removes the lid of a small jar to dip her thumb inside, and drags the pad down on their cheeks, from about the middle of their eyes to the corners of their mouths, leaving a streak of red pigment. 

Finally, she ties his hand to Andrea’s left one, by the wrist, with a short, discolored rope. 

Reuben’s face heats up as he thinks about Andrea’s rejection, when he tried to catch her hand the day before. With this, they’re not holding hands, but it is as close as it will likely ever get.

The back of her hand is unmoving against his own, balled into a fist, although the rest of her appears to be… dormant. Sleeping with her eyes open. 

Yili doesn’t waste a minute. Once she’s done grooming them, she has them reciting the Dawn prayer in its entirety, their eyes closed. Andrea’s delivery is a mumble. 

After that, Yili starts singing the Noontide prayer. Two more elders should be singing with her while everyone else stays quiet -but there’s no one but the five of them today. Andrea’s family is absent, and his is dead; and behind Yili, Susu is filling her pipe, and Selma is fighting to keep her eyes open. She must be about ninety years old, if not older: that she’s even walking is a wonder. Truly chosen by the light. 

As he thinks that, Selma sucks on her lower lip, blinking her eyes open while scratching her skull again. 

She frowns at something well behind him, probably toward the entrance. Out of respect for Yili’s singing, Reuben doesn’t look back even if he wants to. They’re both supposed to stay facing north on their knees during this prayer. But Yili stops singing. 

“What?” She croaks at someone behind him. This time, Reuben does turn his head to see who’s interrupting. 

A man younger than him, about his height but with narrow shoulders, tip toes his way inside the temple with an apologetic face -probably to inform Yili of some urgent matter. He hurries to reach her. A woman with long, blond braids and her mouth in a frown is waiting at the entrance -his wife, maybe, or his sister. 

Reuben’s eyes are on that woman when the liquid hits his jaw, neck and shoulder. 

The smell hits him right after, and he’s standing, causing Andrea to stand with him because of their tied hands. Andrea looks down at her dress, the fabric on her hip and chest now wet, her mouth in a frown. 

The flask that contained the mixture is quite small in the man’s hand, yet the quantity was enough to mark them both well and visibly. His eyes water from the smell. Feces have definitely been mixed with the blood. 

With his sleeve, he wipes his jaw dry, stepping back. 

Andrea is as confused as him. With the tip of her finger, she touches her dress where it is soiled, curious. 

Their reaction is at odds with Yili’s, whose nose is pinched with anger.

The man is standing some ten feet away from the three of them. Susu and Selma are now alert, watching very attentively. 

The intruder’s mouth is now set, his face not so apologetic anymore, waiting for a retribution of some kind maybe, but everyone is too stunned to speak except for Yili, who’s furious. 

“Are you satisfied?” She asks. “Is there anything else you’d like to throw at them?”

“I… I was aiming at him,” the man falters, gesturing at Reuben, “not her.” 

“How considerate. Now leave, you were not invited in.”

“I won’t leave before you promise that this man won’t be married to anyone. Not today, not as long as he lives,” he says, his eyes avoiding Reuben’s. He’s used to people talking about him as if he wasn’t there. 

Yili’s voice is even. “Whether I marry them or not is none of your concern, David.”

“Her spirit is my concern,” David says, now pointing at Andrea.

“No, it’s not.”

Reuben swallows. There are now three women and two men standing at the entrance, pressed against one another, looking at the scene from there. At least they’re not coming in uninvited like _David_ did. 

Susu is watching, her pipe forgotten in her hand. Reuben can’t be certain, but it seems she mouths something like “I knew this would happen.”

David doesn’t give up. “We can’t allow him back inside this temple.”

“We?” Yili snarls. “This is _my_ temple. There is no _we._ ”

“Well---surely-”

“--That man saved your sister’s daughter from drowning.”

Reuben frowns. _So this is the little shit’s uncle?_

Next to him, Andrea is quiet, but attentive, even if her face doesn’t betray anything. David grits his teeth, face red, avoiding Reuben at all costs. “ _So he says._ ”

“ _So your niece says._ ”

“She’s _four_ , how good her judgement could possibly be?”

“What good judgement do you think _you_ possess that you believe yourself in a position to challenge mine, _you impertinent insect_. I taught you to be clean when you were just a boy!”

“Yili--” 

“When this is over, I’m finding your father.” 

“My father will agree with me, as does everyone else.”

Reuben’s eyes find the entrance again, then snap back to the ground. He doesn’t count how many faces are peering inside, but his heart is already beating faster. One of them, he thinks, is Osara’s, although the light coming from outside makes it difficult to recognize anyone. 

Yili raises her voice. “This union is taking place because I’ve decided so!”

“My children, my wife’s spirits are at stake,” David’s hands ball into fists. “ _Everyone_ is at risk. Is he to build a home in the village?”

“ _If I decide so_.”

A few people dare to take _one_ step inside, and as they do, Reuben steps back, but Andrea doesn’t move, and his hand inadvertently tugs on hers. There is no other exit, so whatever happens he’ll be forced to simply accept it. 

“Does this mean he’ll be allowed back in the temple with us now?”

A voice from the entrance, a woman’s, reaches them: “Will he be present during counsels?”

Red hair, white skin, small frame; Reuben can’t place her. A brown-skinned man cuts her off, stepping further inside the temple. “Will he be living in the village again? When is he coming back--”

Yili raises her voice, turning to them. “ _Step. Back._ Step back. None of you have been invited in!”

David grabs her attention again. 

“How can you let another woman be lost to us _Yilimae_? Does she know who she’s marrying?”

This time, Susu speaks up. “She’s fulfilling her role, like the rest of us on this earth.”

“You’re throwing her into death’s arms!”

Behind Susu, Selma grumbles: “Death would spit her right back out.”

Finally David turns to Reuben. His frown deepens, his chest looks ready to burst; he reminds Reuben of the man’s niece when she was crying on the way back to the village. 

“Are you content?” David asks him, and Reuben needs a moment before understanding that David is indeed talking to him directly. “...You will pay for this. Lying your way back among us, using this marriage to do so. What have we done to _you?”_

Reuben’s hand tugs on Andrea’s again.

“The decision was mine!” Yili growls.

David is not getting any closer to Yili -she’s thrown a chair at Eli once for his _insolence_ \- but he’s not backing down. “She’s innocent in this! And a child! I want _her_ to speak. What does _she_ think of all this?” 

Eyes turn to Andrea, whose mouth contorts into a frown. Yili doesn’t back down either. 

“You needn’t hear anything from her.”

“Does she know what happened to Wilo?” 

Reuben tries hard not to flinch, unsure how David knows his dead wife’s name. People remember his, not so much hers. 

“She knows everything, how could she not?” Yili hisses, before turning to the others: “Step! _Back!_ ”

One of them asks her across the room: “Could we delay this, and have _one_ counsel first about… about the dark hour’s son?”

“There is no need for it!”

David is louder now, making sure everyone hears: “Does she know he strangled his own daughter? Does she?”

Reuben opens his mouth soundlessly, stunned. A horrified and quiet “I didn’t” falls from his lips. He winces then, trying to chase away the very few memories he has of his daughter. 

Turning to Susu, feeling like a boy looking for his mother after another child pushed him, he finds comfort in seeing her shake her head at the blatant lie.

“Let us ask her if she is willing to die in the name of marriage!” David goes on ---and Reuben’s heart drops at the sudden change in Andrea’s face. Her brow crinkles, her lips tremble. 

Yili’s face falls.

David’s attention is on Andrea only, now. 

“We’ll hear you. Now is your time to speak.”

At the entrance, everyone is craning their necks to listen and see. Many more people are crowding the doorway. Reuben’s throat is too tight to speak. 

He was close to marry again, but there is no doubt now that it is not happening. 

Everyone is hanging on Andrea’s lips. She seems too upset to get a word out, but eventually, she does.

“M-my tummy hurts,” she says with the most girlish voice Reuben has ever heard. He pauses. 

The same confusion crosses everyone’s faces. David frowns. The people in the back are still craning their necks, quiet, trying to catch her words. 

“...I think I might have gas,” she whines with a sad pout. “I ate a bad egg this morning.”

In the corner, Selma rolls her eyes, slapping her thigh with a low curse. Yili’s stoic mask slips back into place. David’s shoulders sag with disbelief as Andrea sighs, blinking and moving as if she only means to be a polite little girl.

“Will you now let me marry this ugly man, so that we can all be done with it?”

Silence follows. Reuben doesn’t move a muscle. 

Near the entrance, someone asks what she said, but no one repeats any of it. 

Yili turns to David, her old, collected self back. 

“Leave this temple, or I will never let you in again for as long as I live.”

  
  


When Reuben and Andrea exit the temple, husband and wife, the rope tying their hands together has been severed, and Reuben’s chest buzzes with a mix of fear and disbelief. He’s married. 

Stepping back to let them pass, there are many more concerned villagers right outside the temple who’ve come, anxious, to see with their own eyes if the rumor was true.

Everyone is silent now, staring as Reuben and his new wife leave the place. More people watch the scene from afar, from their porches.

Andrea is unperturbed by the staring. It’s good thing if she’s already used to it. 

Reuben tries to keep his eyes down, his wife following him to her new home. They’re to live in his cabin in the forest until further notice. 

_One day_ , he thinks, feeling everyone’s eyes on him as he walks away.

One day they’ll understand that all he wanted was a nod, and general indifference. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [And oh, I wish to god that the earth would turn cold](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCIaj-oLi28)  
> And my heart would forget it's made of glass  
> And all the pretty tulips would disappear  
> And never disturb me again


	6. Hungry young wife

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Kayurka has blessed us with some art of Reuben and Andrea, their hands tied, blindfolded. Follow her, and let her know how talented she is. This is incredible art.](https://twitter.com/Kayurka1/status/1296479138702917632)
> 
> [Once more, Zara made an edit for the story… Look how unbothered Rey is. I can’t guys, this is them :’)](https://twitter.com/zara_ardis/status/1296496155203780608)
> 
> Thank you so, so much to the both of you. 
> 
> Enjoy this new chapter :)

Andrea’s belongings can be held in two large baskets and a worn out bag. All of it is waiting on Susu’s porch, right before they leave the village. 

Reuben notices how closely Andrea watches him carry the somewhat two heavy baskets, while she holds the bag tight to her middle. So he handles them carefully, although there doesn’t seem to be anything fragile in it that he can see: some dresses and a shawl, a blanket, a towel, a few candles, some herbs. 

When they’re alone in the forest is when Reuben feels his pulse quicken, out of nowhere. Someone other than him will be living inside the home he built to fit his simple taste, in the desperate hope that he’d someday leave it without looking back. 

He glances at the nineteen year-old walking by his side. Andrea is going at her own pace, her eyes cast down, her chin set. There’s nothing for her there. She’ll hate it. 

Reuben heaves a silent, frustrated sigh. 

Maybe the more she hates living there, the sooner they’ll be allowed to build a bigger cabin, much closer to the village. Maybe they’ll even move inside a vacant one. 

His wife doesn’t utter a word during the thirty minute walk to the cabin. 

When it comes into sight, he catches how she eyes it, her chin in. Her steps slow to a stop when she spots the modest chicken coop. The chickens cocks their heads at her and cluck in distrust, unused to seeing strangers.

Still wordlessly, she steals a dress from the basket he’s holding and makes her way to the well, taking her bag with her. He frowns, but then remembers about the shit and blood David threw at them. The hut isn’t far from the well; she’ll know where to change without his help.

He swallows and takes her baskets inside. 

Reuben is of a quiet temperament. His mouth twisting, he thinks that Andrea’s might match it well. 

The door shuts out the cicadas, and Reuben puts down the baskets. He winces at the plain table and chairs, at the shelves and all the jars, the old stove, the lack of space, the chest in the corner where he keeps clothes and blankets, all piled on one side to leave room for hers.

He stares at the thin separation he calls a wall, hiding the  _ straw bed _ . 

That bed is barely large enough for him to sleep comfortably, and they’re now expected to share it. He hardly had the time to build a new one before the wedding. His palms sweat at the mere thought of having to discuss this with her. 

If they move into the village, maybe they’ll get a new bed anyway -although he has no reason to hope that’ll happen soon.

The door swings open, and he flinches, stepping back. As small as she is, a fresh cotton dress on, collar tight around her neck and long sleeves, the soiled dress over her arm, Andrea takes up all the space. 

She brushed her hair but braided it back tightly, and the fleeting thought that it is immodest to show unbraided hair to anyone a woman isn’t married to, crosses his mind. Suddenly, he covers his mouth. 

She’s freshly cleaned, smelling faintly of the black soap he keeps in the hut to wash his body and his clothes --but that scent is barely there, fading under a stronger smell, that has him wrinkling his nose. Not a bad odor, but  _ strong _ . Like alcohol. To repel insects, or rodents, or, or---

Reuben watches her screw a small jar of ointment shut, drop it inside a basket, her brown wedding dress held in her clenched fist. 

He can’t find anything to say. The space is organized simply enough that she can see for herself where everything is. The ladder is in the grass by the chicken coop, the watercan is on the porch, the washboard by the stove. 

As if hearing his thoughts, the soiled dress she wore for their union lands on the table. 

She picks up her two baskets. “Wash it, but don’t bother too much with the stain. It’ll make a fine stamp on my chest for my next marriage,” she instructs before leaving the room, without a glance at him. 

She disappears behind the wall, her steps loud in the whole cabin, while he stares at the dress. 

He bites his cheek, and eventually takes the washboard. Some time later, the dress is hanging on the clothesline, clean. At the risk of displeasing his young wife, Reuben did manage to get rid of the stain. 

Until supper, the rest of the day after that is uneventful. Without warning, Andrea leaves the cabin under the midday sun, out of the forest, into the field, until he can’t see her. 

When done in good faith, marriage ties both spouses close to one another. There’s hardly any task that they’re not expected to do together, hardly anywhere they don’t go walking side by side. Still, Reuben is not stupid enough to call her, or to run after her. 

He takes care of the usual chores instead. He waters the seedlings in the greenhouse, lets the chickens out, removes the eggs he finds in their nests, to place them in a small cache he built inside the kitchen floor, under a large panel. 

Spouses must fast on their wedding day. However Reuben needs to get into his wife’s good graces, so he decides to feed her before bed. 

With spinach leaves, radish tops, potatoes and white onions, he makes a soup. The window and the door are wide open to let the heat from the stove out.

Reuben is pacing when Andrea is back just in time, tired, right as the night begins to fall. He wouldn’t dare say a word on her lateness and serves her a plate, while she disappears behind the wall to drop her bag, hiding it away from him. She sits at the table without remorse for traditions, and eats, finishing her plate  _ and  _ the bread. The unfamiliar smell of whatever she applied on herself is as strong as earlier, but thankfully it doesn’t ruin his appetite. 

Crickets aren’t loud enough to tune out the silence between them. Reuben feels incapable of starting a conversation. How long has it been? How do you meet a stranger?

He looks up to find she undid a button of her dress, right in the middle of her chest, to slip a hand inside, and he looks away, blood burning. 

She pulls a cigarette from there, that she sticks between her lips, standing to place the tip over the candle burning on the table. 

That’s when he speaks, finding he hasn’t been able to let go of one thing since they’ve left the temple, his heart beating hard. A stubborn need to save his name, after all those years. 

“I didn’t strangle my daughter.” 

He barely dares to look at her as she sits again, blowing out smoke, her eyes finding him for the first time since the tea ceremony. 

“I don’t care,” she says flatly. 

She leans back in her chair. 

This is about the best sign of a plato Reuben can hope for, he presumes. 

Still, while she smokes, the matter forgotten already, he thinks quietly to himself that  _ he _ does care. He didn’t kill his newborn baby. 

Later, he joins her in the  _ bedroom _ to finally show her where she can place her belongings, and tell her about the chest, but before he says a word, she speaks, her back to him and her spine straight, standing right by the bed. 

“Is this  _ my _ bed?” She asks, as if seeing it for the first time. 

There is no other bed. He gets her meaning, yielding. 

“Yes.” 

To be sure she’s understood, she adds: “And where will  _ you  _ be sleeping?”

A long, embarrassing silence follows as he seriously thinks about it, but can’t come up with anything other than: “On the floor.”

“In here?” She asks with an innocent lilt. 

Alright. 

With her baskets in the middle, there’s hardly any room in here anyway. He’ll have to sleep into the main room, by the opposite wall. 

“...No,” Reuben abdicates again. 

Andrea looks right ahead. “Goodnight.”

He’ll have to deal with the bedding situation after all. 

It’s on the hard floor under a blanket, after removing his shoes, that Reuben falls asleep thinking the day didn’t go as bad as it could have.

  
  


However, several more days follow until the first sitting with Yili, and the rest of the week is ---revealing. 

Andrea doesn’t empty her baskets. 

If he wanted to, while his wife leaves the cabin every single day, Reuben could take a look inside; but his goal is hardly to get her to resent him more than she already does, so he doesn’t take the risk. Something tells him that, for her to leave those baskets unguarded, she must know the position she’s in. 

Andrea also keeps applying that  _ pommade  _ on herself. Reuben gets used to the smell somewhat, but not enough that he goes anywhere too close to her. 

Every night he sleeps on the hard floor, on his back. 

Andrea doesn’t cook, or clean, or help with the garden, or wash any clothes, or cut any wood. She doesn’t fish, she doesn’t bring home any plant or fruit, or anything that grows wild in the forest or on the hill, that they could trade for something they need in the village.

What she  _ does _ is disappear for hours with her bag.

Andrea barely speaks to him. Just what is necessary. Reuben, unlike her, is foolish enough to try to get her to talk a few times. He gives up quickly. 

She moves with a calculated air of indifference, but at times, Reuben sees evidence that she pays attention. She watches him when she thinks he’s not aware. She takes notes of the cache, under the loose panel in the kitchen, and keeps a keen eye open. 

For several days, Andrea gives the chickens dark looks from the porch. 

“I’d like some chicken for supper.”

Reuben halts right where he is, having just fed them. 

In his mind, it makes no question that his chickens aren’t to eat. He wouldn’t be able to kill them, or even to pick one to kill. Although none of them were given a name, he knows the temperament of each bird.

Solitude does strange things to a man, that any living being that doesn’t spit insults at him becomes a friend. Reuben has eaten animals other than fish before; the last time was some fifteen years ago. 

In fifteen years, nothing has been easily earned. To get a hen and a rooster, he had to work, beg and wait; to get more fowls, they had to mate; for any of them to still be alive today, he had to feed them, and care for them. 

Having to feed those birds in the morning was the reason he’d get up at all, when he’d go to bed wishing he’d never wake up. 

So softly, treading lightly, Reuben argues to his hungry young wife that he’d rather they keep them all alive. “They lay good eggs.”

He’s relieved when she appears to drop it. 

Later that day, he comes home with  _ four _ fish, long like his forearms. The level of the river is low, and he could have caught more, but more would have been wasteful. 

The window open to let the smoke out, he guts them, then cooks them on the stove, his mouth watering. 

Turned away from the porch, he hears Andrea’s footsteps before the chicken cries in alarm.

“That one seems about ripe,” she says, lifting the bird up by the wings to show him from across the room, “the meat should be good.”

Reuben puts the lid back on the pot. 

“...I already cooked some fish,” is all he finds to say.

“Soon, then.”

Twisting his mouth without meaning to, trying to find a way to say  _ no _ , he tries again. “I want us to be able to count on the eggs. Eight chickens isn’t too many--”

Andrea suddenly drops the animal. The bird runs outside shrieking. “You’re awfully difficult,” she accuses tightly. “Have you never learned to compromise? For the sake of marriage?”

Reuben falls quiet.

They spend the rest of the day in silence. Andrea eats more than her share of fish. 

A light breeze has him suspicious of the clear sky when she leaves the cabin the next day. 

An hour later, the sky is dark and the wind picks up. While there is no rain yet, the thunder is getting closer. 

_ This is why spouses never part.  _ Reuben has no idea where his wife is, and if something happens to her, he’ll be forced to leave the land  _ forever _ this time. 

All he can do is pace inside the cabin and stand on his porch to watch if she’s coming back.

Soon, the wind bends the trees left and right, and it swallows Reuben’s voice easily when he tries to call her name. Feeling that he’s starting to panic, he tries to tell himself she must have taken shelter somewhere, until the end of the storm. 

When the water starts pouring, the thunder right above his head, Reuben catches the chickens two by two to get them all inside the cabin. The birds are terrified of the storm; they cluck and cry, and when they’re all inside, they cram themselves into one corner, plucking at each other.

Reuben is lighting up the gas lamp when he sees Andrea running home through the window.

She bursts inside drenched, dress sticking to her skin and braids heavy with water, wide-eyed and shaking. The chickens’ presence immediately aggravates her. 

“Get them out,” she hisses, jaw tight, right as a flash of lightning cracks the sky open. 

Meaning to change the subject, what he says infuriates her even more. “I was worried, you shouldn’t go so far that you can’t come home in time if a storm breaks.” 

She grits her teeth. “They’ll shit everywhere. Get them out.”

“They’re scared of the thunder.”

Andrea inhales deeply, her jaw moving. Reuben wonders if she’s enraged that the chickens found shelter before her. 

The birds aren’t reassured by her presence in the slightest, and Reuben hesitantly steps between his wife and them. “I’ll clean whatever mess they make. Put on a dry dress. You’ll fall sick.”

The wet, cold clothes on her back pushes her to leave the room for now, to change. But the calm is short-lived.

During supper, while the storm still rages on, Andrea startles him by throwing a spoon at the one chicken that won’t stop clucking -and before Reuben knows it, she’s running after it, around the table, three of the fowls jumping and flapping their wings in alarm, until Reuben stands in her way. 

“Stop this.”

She stomps her foot. “Move!” Then, taking a deep breath, she points at the bird: “That one is the one we’ll eat.  _ To celebrate our union _ .”

“We can’t afford to kill any of them,” he tries, staying where he is. “They lay good eggs, but not too many a week.”

Andrea’s eyes are black with fury. “If they’re good for nothing, why keep them anyway?”

“They don’t need much to eat, might as well count on the eggs--”

“I’ll tell Yilimae that the  _ chickens _ come before your wife, a fine husband you are.”

“She’ll find my reasoning sensible.”

“ _ Hah! _ ” 

This can’t really be about the chickens, Reuben reasons, terrified himself of his small wife as she storms out of the room, the wind screaming outside to compliment her mood.

The three birds come to hide behind his feet, clucking in distress, while the five others are still in the corner.

The storm keeps going long after supper, well into the night. Everything Reuben has grown in the forest will be ruined. The greenhouse must have been torn apart. 

It doesn’t matter. The woman he married is safe inside, and the chickens he’s raised are all sleeping against him on the floor, one of them on his chest, purring. 

It’s only been seven days after all, he repeats to himself. 

  
  


Still, he stares at the ceiling, unable to find sleep. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Gonna be the death of me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Izk-40vclJs)  
> It's a danger  
> Cause our love is a ghost that the others can't see
> 
> \-----------Rey said I don’t cook, I don’t clean, but let me tell you I got this ring :/
> 
> Yes, chickens do purr. 
> 
> Thank you all so much for reading :)


	7. Salt water, red water

The nights are shorter and shorter. Despite a poor sleep, lying on the hard floor, Reuben keeps getting up with the sun. 

The day following the storm, he had to fix the frame of the greenhouse, drain the garden further into the forest with dry dirt, tie his plants to new stakes, driven a foot into the ground, then straighten out the small enclosure around the coop. Alone. 

Since the storm, Andrea hasn’t mentioned the chickens again, or even looked at them. In fact, she hasn’t spoken to him at all.

Her lips tighten when he reminds her of where they need to be today. Still, she sits on the porch and eats her sun-dried tomatoes at her own pace, straight out of the jar, with some bread. She doesn’t hurry either when it’s time to leave; as if none of it made any difference at all to her. 

In fairness, Reuben isn’t rushing either. The thought of another mix of blood and shit being thrown at him gives him reasons to be cautious as they enter the village, regardless of how much he’s daydreamed of living here since the marriage. By chance, and because Susu’s cabin is north of the village and it is still early, they don’t meet anyone. 

Susu sits with her legs crossed on her bench against the wall, by the window, her pipe in hand, her scarf tight around her hair, hiding them. Reuben and Andrea sit facing her, on two of her straw chairs. All around them, on the shelves all over the walls, are countless jars filled with plants and flowers. Sometimes, Reuben forgets that she’s the healer of the village first, an elder second. 

Reuben has heard of strange conversations being held in the privacy of Susu’s home, especially with the youngest couples, childlike disputes that were solved in unconventional ways. Spouses are often shy with one another. Grooming, cooking, habits of all kinds are topics of conversation as serious as the rest: the role they must fill as a spouse, and as a member of the community, how well they honor the parents of their spouse -all of it to ensure the home is ready to welcome a child. 

Yili shuffles to the bench to sit there with Susu, her white hair gathered in one long braid along her back.

Reuben is first asked if he could easily accommodate another person under his roof. He lies and says he could. He’s asked again if they’re comfortable, if they eat well, if they reached an agreement about the chores. He lies, and says that everything is in order. Andrea doesn’t deny it. 

“It’s been eight days,” Susu suddenly says with a grunt, “Andrea. How do you find your husband?”

Reuben doesn’t look at his wife. There’s a pause, before she says, tone carefully neutral: “He’s well, thank you for asking.”

“...Is his  _ appearance _ to your taste?”

“No.”

Heat crawls up Reuben’s face as he sits still. Susu gives him a look then, frowning, as if to say:  _ what did you do? _

Andrea’s hands are folded in her lap, her shoulders relaxed against the back of the chair. Yili doesn’t move or speak, listening closely. 

“Reuben can change his grooming,” Susu tries, looking him over. “What is it that offends you? His clothes? ...His smell?”

“He’s old, and large.”

An uncomfortable silence follows; he might be expected to react, but he won’t. Susu smacks her lips. 

“Reuben, how about a new diet?”

“Susu,” he says quietly, incredulous. How could his diet somehow solve his wife’s  _ dislike  _ for his  _ age  _ and how he’s built? They’ve barely started talking, that the conversation has already become absurd. 

“What,” Susu shrugs.

“I don’t like his ears,” Andrea adds, unprompted. 

Reuben stays still and calm. Absently, he thinks to himself that Wilo loved his ears.

Susu purses her lips, annoyed. She turns to him again. “A different diet, Reuben, what do you think?”

“How about I cut my ears off instead, this way I’d also lose weight?”

Susu rolls her eyes, exasperated, but Yili speaks before her. 

“What about you, Reuben? ...Do you find your wife to your taste?”

Reuben clenches his jaw tight to not speak too fast. Out of petty revenge for how mean she’s been, he should say that he finds Andrea’s frame to be weak-looking, and her hair to be unkempt, but he wouldn’t want to cause the two elders to regret their decision to marry them any more than they probably already do. He twists his mouth.

“Reuben?” 

“Yes,” he admits quietly. “I find her pretty.” 

“What about her manners?”

He lets out a short, breathless laugh. “Her manners will do,” he says, a bit tightly.

“...Feed her well.”

Reuben raises an eyebrow at Yili. “I do.”

“She should be fatter than this, at nineteen.”

Andrea’s hands furtively twist in her lap. A fleeting sign of self-consciousness. 

Reuben nods, his eyes staring back into Yili’s, wondering what the elder can actually  _ see _ of his wife’s constitution, if her observation is based on Andrea’s appearance at all. “She eats more than I do.”

“Good.”

The entire sitting is brief; it’s only been a week. Still, had they entered this marriage in good faith, they would have needed more time to talk. Yili spends a good part of the hour speaking about peaceful homes and the meaning of marriage. She probably won’t show up for the next few sittings. 

For evident reasons, Reuben doesn’t mention at any point the  _ difficulties _ he’s met with his wife, and Andrea stays quiet, he suspects because it’s in her best interest to at least pretend she’ll try, considering this is her  _ thirteenth  _ marriage. 

When they leave, his eyes linger on the neighbors’ cabins. He slows down at the sounds of dishes, the smells of breakfast. The cicadas are timid, but starting their day already. 

But a young boy with a stick stares at him, on a porch, further behind. Reuben looks down and catches up to his wife. 

They walk back to the cabin in tight silence, Andrea’s sour mood surfacing back. When they get there, she goes to hide inside the small hut by the well without a word. 

Reuben is measuring the bed with his thumbs, crouching, when Andrea enters the cabin. There isn’t enough room to have another bed where they eat, but he could make this one larger, if he can convince his wife that they’ll sleep in the same bed but won’t touch each other. How naive of him. 

Andrea’s  _ assessment  _ is to the point. “There is no need, I won’t accept you in a bigger bed.” Then her small hands ball into fists. “We’ll be separated in a few months at the most. Can’t you be patient?”

He finds silence to be wiser than telling her he doesn’t intend to  _ ever _ let her go. That, she wouldn’t take well; in fact, she would hear it as a challenge. 

Later that morning, he leaves the cabin before her, for once, taking a basket and a knife with him to pick wild asparagus. 

The raspberries he sees on his way are here early, but far from ripe enough for him to pick. The asparagus however, when he finds them after walking for longer than he needed to the previous year, have invaded that part of the forest where the trees let more sun in, an hour west from the cabin.

His basket heavy with greens and his back sore, all Reuben thinks about walking back is whether or not he has enough empty jars at home. He’ll have to peel the asparagus, boil them in salt water until they’re white, cool them, cook them, then boil a few jars.

Approaching the cabin, he hears the sounds of dishes through the open window, so he looks up at the sun. It’s well past noon; Andrea likely didn’t care to wait for him to be home and serve her.

The image he comes home to is a perfect one. 

Wilo was an excellent cook. She would stand just like Andrea does when he walks through the door, in front of the stove, the table set. Long braids reaching her waist, she doesn’t turn around. The taste of it is so strong on his tongue, he has to pause in the doorway, inhaling the fifteen-year old memory, dizzy at the sight. Then, he blinks. The whole cabin smells of chicken meat. 

He rushes to the pot, the basket dropped behind. Andrea wordlessly steps aside. 

With the wet cloth that was drying on the back of the chair, he opens the lid, only to slam it shut immediately, after one look inside. 

His blood is boiling but he finds himself unable to move, the heat of the stove burning his face. Next to him, wiping clean two long knives above the basin, Andrea goes on as if he weren’t there. The bucket full of the insides, blood and feathers of the chicken she killed is still at her feet. 

She takes it and calmly walks out to throw all of it in the grass, from the porch. Her chin high, she then comes back for the basin to do the same, the red water sloshing inside. 

Reuben watches her. 

He sits on the closest chair, breathing steady. His fists curl tight on his thighs as he follows her from the corner of his eye, then stares ahead, waiting to calm down. Everything he burns to say or do in this moment will ruin this marriage and his hopes for the future  _ beyond repair _ . 

“Hope you’re hungry,” Andrea tells him. 

If she possesses any instinct or discernment, she must sense the anger in him, simmering right under the surface, but she ignores it, moving the pot to the table. 

The steam escapes the pot in waves while she serves herself a plate, jabbing the meat with a fork, her nails still black with dried blood. 

She’s about to reach for his plate to do the same, but he swiftly slams it upside down on the table before she can,  _ almost  _ making her flinch. 

Andrea doesn’t comment and sits across him, her eyes on the meat, the pieces nicely framed with onions, black olives, and a few leaves of laurel.

The only thing that could hurt him more would be to waste the meat by throwing it away before she can eat it. 

For a moment, he can’t look at her, his skin feeling too tight for his body. He waits for the moment he’ll be able to speak or move without breaking anything. 

Andrea isn’t quiet. She eats with her hands, chews on the greasy skin, slurps on the veins and the bones, the juice smeared on her chin and her cheeks, her mouth full. Even her nose is shiny with it. 

She doesn’t try again to serve him, and instead ends up eating the whole chicken, leaving its carcass clean inside the pot. 

When she’s done, she leans back in her chair, her brow creased, her greasy fingers holding her belly, a burp stuck in her chest. 

Reuben is left to clean the dishes. 

That evening, he doesn’t cook anything, and he doesn’t eat. While she’s away, he counts the rest of his chickens several times, wanting to believe that she might have eaten one that wasn’t his somehow, losing his mind. But he counts seven of them. No more, no less. 

One of the birds is not moving, sitting in a corner of the coop. After catching it and making sure it isn’t hurt, Reuben lets it go, and watches it go back to the same corner, away from the others. Facing the fence. Upset.

Reuben sits on the porch. Trying to think reasonably, but unable to, asking himself over and over if he’ll have to never leave the cabin to make sure his wife won’t eat another chicken. 

Yili won’t hear it. It’s just a chicken. 

So he forgets about the elders, and spends hours wondering how far Andrea will allow herself to go, before she risks something. What does his wife have to lose? 

The next day, Reuben doesn’t make her breakfast, and he still can’t eat. She leaves in the morning, her walk and demeanor as confident as the previous days. Almost self-satisfied, if he knows her well enough already. 

Chores are left undone while Reuben sits on his porch again. 

A few hours later, probably ruining the efforts he made since the marriage, he ends up kneeling by her baskets, looking through his wife’s possessions. Nothing catches his eye. 

Dried flowers and plants, tied together inside a few jars. Feathers, pieces of papers, notes, pencils, drawings. He doesn’t even know what he’s looking for. 

By the window, he opens the one notebook he found under the rest, the words meaningless forms to him. Some of the plants Andrea drew he does recognize. His father taught him a bit about flowers, a year or so before his first marriage. 

The drawings send him through a chain of buried memories of his father and him in the mountain -but it doesn’t help him learn anything about his wife. 

He looks up just in time after flipping the pages, through the window. She’s far, far away in the open field, the dry grass up to her waist, her bag on her shoulder. Coming back. 

When she opens the door, he’s holding the notebook right above the stove’s opening, the heat licking his hand. 

Andrea freezes. 

“Don’t,” she chokes, eyes wide. 

“Step any closer, and I’ll drop it inside. Stay where you are.”

On instinct, she takes a step back. “Don’t. Don’t do that.”

Not a reaction Reuben was certain to get, but his intuition was correct for this one time. He tightens his grip on the notebook, the pages bending. 

“Please,” he hears her say for the first time. 

His heart is pounding, but his voice, incredibly, stays gentle. “If you kill another--”

“I won’t kill another one,” she immediately promises. 

“I mean it. I am not asking for much. You can have the bed. You can leave the house unchaperoned. You can throw your soiled clothes at me. But if you kill another one of those birds---” He lowers the notebook, the fire right under it. Andrea drops her bag, shaking. 

“Stop!!”

“...I will burn everything you own. You understand?” 

“Yes!” She nods, “I do. I won’t do it again.”

He shouldn’t be doing this. He cannot afford to act this way. But his throat closes at the thought of her pointedly eating that chicken whole. Running after it when it had nowhere to go. The men and women who stared at him when he left the temple. 

He drops the notebook. 

Andrea screams like he’s never heard anyone scream. “ _ No!!! _ ”

Before he can react, she throws herself at the stove, opens the front and sticks her hand inside in a flash to pull the burning notebook out.

It falls to the floor when she burns herself, snarling. Beating the notebook down against the floor, on her knees, she yelps when he yanks her arm to plunge it inside the basin, the obstinate girl unaware that her sleeve caught fire. He releases her immediately, the water spilling when she reels back. Reuben closes his eyes. 

They both kneel there, panting. 

The notebook is  _ mostly _ intact, except for the first few pages, black and curled. It doesn’t matter. 

Andrea is breathing hard through her teeth, eyes shining with tears, her burned hand trembling when she picks up the notebook. Reuben swallows, bracing himself, but he has no regret. 

“You _dull_ , simple-minded _worthless_ _man_ ,” she rasps, her voice low, standing up. She looks down at him as he stays on his knees, his head low. Her face suddenly crumples; hot tears roll down her cheeks; her voice shakes. “You’re no better than the rest... You deserve the way they treat you.”

Reuben means to simply instruct her to sit down, then, so he can apply the white ointment on her hand and take care of her burn. But he’s not left a moment to think. 

With fury, Andrea pushes three jars off a shelf, sending them crashing down on the floor. 

He ducks by instinct, an armed raised above his head to protect himself. Sugar, flour, olives and salt water -all of it is wasted in front of him. 

His wife runs out of the door, taking her bag and her notebook with her. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [And I said hello Satan](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfWSOs5YbQ8)  
> I believe it is time to go   
> Me and the devil walkin' side by side


	8. Strange

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I read every comment. Thank you to everyone who's been unreasonably kind reading this fic. 
> 
> All my love to [Ana on twitter, for her almost-moodboards](https://twitter.com/twbyana/status/1304258407872987137)
> 
> and to zara_ardis on twitter, bless her, for this series of art about Andrea, exactly what I needed after the last update: 
> 
> [Andrea is eating good](https://twitter.com/zara_ardis/status/1301204382986375168)   
>  [Andrea is eating well](https://twitter.com/zara_ardis/status/1304810151656828930)   
>  [Andrea and Reuben](https://twitter.com/zara_ardis/status/1306663964315512832)   
>  [Andrea got them all](https://twitter.com/zara_ardis/status/1308439330319261696)   
>  [What if Andrea sits on Reuben's lap, what then?](https://twitter.com/zara_ardis/status/1309187266644832256)

Reuben doesn’t feel anything at first: no anger, no fear. A strange calm settles all around the cabin. 

The afternoon is warm, and he sweeps the floor, gathering in one place the broken glass found in every corner of the room. He throws the wasted food to the chickens. After that, he takes care of the chores he neglected the previous day. 

But then, the night falls, and Andrea still isn’t back. 

Suddenly, Reuben’s indifference swiftly morphs into panic. 

Because the sky is too dark for him to see any further than a few feet away, he’s trapped inside with nothing to do but wait, and all the time he needs to think of the worst; of why his wife still isn’t back, and what the consequences could be. 

Several times, he tries to sit and calm down, wishing Andrea and he could talk and be truthful; but he fails to get anywhere, even in his imagination. If he was given a chance to appease her, by revealing what little expectations he has from this marriage, surely she would use that against him and tell the elders; she’d say he has no desire to be a proper husband to her, and that he’s admitted it. 

But why worry about this, when her absence could mean so much worse? 

Alone by his lamp, Reuben tries not to let himself believe something happened to her, or that she left for good -without success. Soon, he’s anticipating every moment of his eventual fall, all of it inspired by vivid memories of what happened fifteen years ago; he speculates wildly about what the elders would decide to make of him this time, and the thought alone is enough for his heart to race. 

By sunrise, he is ready to  _ grovel.  _ He’s set to forget about the chicken, the bed, the wasted food; none of this matters anymore with the possibility of her being dead. 

To end his misery, Andrea has the fine idea to be back right as he’s about to lose his mind.

She looks exhausted and mean, lips tight as if tasting something bitter, a wounded animal crawling back into its hole. Her skirt is muddy, her hair damp with sweat, her cheeks red. She holds her bag tight to her chest, and he winces at that. She hates him.

Swallowing his own resentment, shameful but relieved, Reuben goes to her with the intention to care for her burn -but predictably, Andrea evades his touch like she should have evaded the fire. She doesn’t spare him a glance and goes to her baskets, ignoring his concerned questions. 

The following night, he doesn’t push his luck and lets her rest without bothering her more. From the other side of the wall, in the dark, he stares at the panels desperately trying to read her mind -but he’s not left to wonder for long. 

Several days go by, and Andrea refuses to eat what he serves her.

Like before, she leaves the cabin all day long, every day, her bag with her; and when she’s home, if Reuben insists she eats -and he does many times- she leaves the cabin again, at night if necessary, to hide in the long grass. 

She doesn’t take anything in secret. The bread, the jars, his plants are all intact. 

Considering what has happened between them, Reuben doesn’t let this discourage him too fast, and he trusts that his wife is getting her spirit and strength from  _ something _ , that she must be eating whatever she finds out there in the wild. Still, he can’t be sure that she eats well, and if she loses weight, or if her cheeks lose their color, Yili will notice it without fail. 

One morning, early enough that Andrea is still sleeping, Reuben makes his way in the dark to the bedroom. Barely daring to breathe, he blindly finds her bag, and without a sound he slips a large piece of bread wrapped in a cloth into it, with a small jar of sun dried tomatoes and green peppers. 

He says nothing to her as she leaves, passing him on the porch while he’s doing some laundry, the basin filled with soapy water at his feet.

A moment later, the chickens are fighting over the bread near the clothesline; she threw the jar not far away.

Thankfully, Yili isn’t present for the second sitting. 

Susu is bored and smokes her pipe, while Tahmele takes over. Reuben’s heart is loud in his ears. For a week, he’s tried to prepare solid answers in case his wife would come with a plan. But Tahmele doesn’t ask him if he feeds her well, so he stays quiet. More importantly, Andrea stays quiet unless spoken to. She doesn’t mention the chicken, or the notebook. She hides the burn on her hand. 

Reuben is not stupid enough to take this as a good sign, but he’ll take it anyway. 

Two men, a woman and a boy stare from afar as he and Andrea exit Susu’s cabin, and Reuben lowers his head in humility as a sign of good faith, set on leaving the village without lingering -but Andrea gasps out of nowhere and waves at the group excitedly, like a little girl waving at a playmate. 

He shoots her a dark look to get her to stop, but naturally it doesn’t have the desired effect on her. 

“Good Morning!” She calls with her girlish voice, “I’m Andrea, and this is the black bear!”

Reuben feels his ears burn as the boy shouts back, angry, “We  _ know _ !” -while the parents scowls at her.

Low, he hisses her name, reaching to take her hand and pull her with him -but Andrea dodges his touch. He swallows down the humiliation; Andrea finally turns away from them and starts walking, falling back into complete silence. 

Reuben is quiet when she refuses to eat again later -fresh eggs and bread- then when she leaves the cabin. That evening, however, he’s not able to hold his tongue, resentment taking the upper hand again. 

“Your plate is ready,” he says when she appears in the doorway.

To his surprise, she doesn’t ignore him this time. 

“Is it chicken? _ ”  _ She asks, reminding him more than ever that she’s only nineteen years old. He doesn’t know why he lets himself forget that. “...If not, I don’t want it.” 

“Just eat.”

“Your cooking tastes like shit. I have no appetite for it.” 

“How’s the hand?” His tone is suddenly goading, and he clamps his mouth shut, too late. 

He hasn’t moved, so he’s confused when she clutches the strap of her bag, her other hand finding the end of the wall at the mere mention of her burn, as if by instinct: to bar the way, and keep him from throwing more of her things into the fire, he realizes. 

The pang of guilt in his chest inexplicably makes him resent her more. 

What he means to say is:  _ you’ll have to trust me, you can’t count on anything else to save what’s yours but on my word _ . What he says instead is: 

“You weigh nothing, because you don’t eat. I could walk right through you.”

“Did you walk right through your wife when she was expecting?” She shoots back, her voice wavering but her eyes black. 

Reuben falls quiet, struck. 

She asks again: “...Is that what happened?” 

He would welcome her anger as progress from her continued silence any other day, but any mention of Wilo cuts too deep for him to be able to even speak clearly. 

He swallows hard. “No. That’s not what happened.” 

He’s fast out of the cabin before anything unfortunate happens, to disappear into the dark until he can breathe again.

She refuses to eat the next day, and the days after that. He doesn’t try to change her mind.

His resentment simmers slowly, and when he sees her through the doorway dragging her feet back home, one evening, it boils over again, rancid and bitter.

“I don’t want to wonder if you’re dead every time you leave for hours. This has to stop.” He’s sitting at the table, the basin is between his feet; he’s cooling a preserve, and he doesn’t take a good look at her when she passes. 

A loud thud from the other side of the wall interrupts his thoughts, one he feels in his feet through the floor.

“Andrea.”

She makes a point of staying silent, so he gets up to see what she’s doing. 

He finds her lying on the floor, by the bed, looking like she went to sit on the edge but lost her balance somehow. What really has him rush to her side is that she’s not pushing herself up.

“Andrea? ...Andrea?”

She’s not unconscious, but too weak to push him away when he turns her on her side. His hand finds her neck to sit her up, but he stops, frowning. Her skin is damp and burning hot against his palm. 

She’s not scowling at him. Her cheeks are aflame and her forehead pale, pearling with sweat; her eyes are unfocused, her lips parted and dry. 

Reuben is at Susu’s door half an hour later, knocking on it like a mad man, feeling like he might vomit. 

The last time he came running to this door his wife was dying in his bed, his daughter with her. 

Distantly, a voice tells him he shouldn’t be so loud at this hour; the neighbors could hear him, and who knows what they’ll say of his presence in the village  _ at night _ , or what they’ll  _ do _ about it once they learn it’s because his wife is ill. 

But it doesn’t stop him. He ends up banging on the door until Susu opens it. 

“Have you come here to break my door? Idiot!”

“--There’s something wrong with my wife.”

Susu goes very still. For all he remembers, this could be word for word what he told her fifteen years ago. 

She mutters something, and then quietly laments: “What did you do, Reuben?”

“Nothing!” His heart speeds up. “Nothing, she… She has a fever?”

“Is she throwing up blood?”

“No, no she’s---”

“Shitting blood, pissing blood?”

“No! I don’t-- she has a fever,” Reuben just repeats, powerless.

“Is there any blood leaving her body?”

Frustrated, he huffs another “ _ No _ .” 

“Wait here.”

The small woman disappears inside and he’s left to fidget like a boy on the porch. 

Someone watches him through a window, two cabins away, and this doesn’t inspire him as much worry and shame as it should. Instead, he has to fight off the strange, overwhelming urge to go break that window open, his hand curling into fists.

Susu is back quickly, to throw a bag of plants at him. “Dip that in hot water. Have her drink a lot of it. If she’s not better in three days at the latest, come back here. Reuben?”

He stops just as he’s turning to leave. Susu looks him straight in the eyes. 

“Have her be better in three days.” 

The elder pauses meaningfully; then, she closes the door.

  
  


Reuben’s thoughts are racing on his way back. His stomach is in knots again when he reaches the cabin. 

Inside, Andrea isn’t on the bed where he left her. 

She’s kneeling in the corner of the room next to a basket, trembling, her hair wet with sweat. The gas lamp on the floor makes her giant shadow quiver on the wall. She’s trying to open one of her jars. 

For once, she’s not doing anything wrong, and she’s not being difficult. 

Still, his immediate reaction is to stride over to her, and without difficulty, rip the jar from her hands, sending it rolling to the side. 

She’s not even given the time to react; panic rising in him, Reuben roughly rearranges her against his chest to pick her up, while muttering low like a man gone mad, as if to himself rather than to her. “No. No.  _ No.  _ You’ll take what Susu said to take. What I give you.  _ You’ll do what I fucking say _ .”

He’s a bit too rough again when he lays her on the bed and moves her, desperate to hold her down, tuck her in, trap her as if he could trap the fever this way. 

Andrea is too weak to do anything about it but groan. Her head rolls back on the mattress when he sits at the end of it, her feet in his lap. With trembling fingers, he gives her shoelaces sharp pulls, getting revenge on them. The shoes are carelessly discarded before he buries her under the two heavy blankets he owns, and the quilt too. 

He’s back with the brew as soon as it’s ready. 

“Andrea. Hey. Hey,” he pats her cheek to get her to open her eyes, not as gentle in his haste as he should be. Too ill to question what he gives her, she tries to take a sip, but she starts with a wince, covering her mouth.

He realizes, guilty, that it’s burning hot. Holding the cup to his mouth, bent over her, he gently blows on the medecine to cool it. Andrea shuts her eyes, frowning, sweat beading on her forehead; she feels her lower lip with the tip of her finger. He thinks he hears her murmur  _ asshole _ .

Once she drank it all, Reuben stands to leave but stops at the sight of the jar he took from her earlier. The leaves inside are the same shape and color as the ones Susu gave him. Small and round, grey on one side, purplish on the other. He bites the inside of his cheek, but says nothing.

  
He brings a chair and sits in a corner, Susu’s words forming a loop in his head.  _ Have her be better in three days. _

In the morning, Andrea is still burning up -and for three days, it doesn’t seem like her fever drops at all. 

__

To not lose his mind thinking of the worst possible outcomes ahead, and not obsessively check on his wife, Reuben feeds the chicken, crawls into the greenhouse, busies himself with chores; but even then he can’t seem to stay away for long. In her state, Andrea rarely notices if he’s there or not, but even sick she’s too much of a mule and too proud to ever call him or speak to him. 

__

While fixing the quilt over her on the first day, he feels something square shaped by her hip. He’s about to lift the blankets when he realizes at the same moment what it is. Her notebook is of the same size, and she manifestly doesn’t trust him not to take it again. 

__

Reuben pretends he hasn’t noticed, guilt twisting in his guts. He huffs quietly for good measure, but doesn’t say anything. 

__

Later, she’s reaching for the brew he left on the floor by the bed, seemingly just out of reach. Head heavy resting on the mattress, buried under the blankets except for her hand, Andrea is on her front, all strength gone from her. 

__

This shouldn’t vexe him, but it does. “Why do you not call me?”

__

He presumed Andrea was unaware of his presence in the room correctly: she flinches at the sound of his voice. As if from embarrassment, her hand  _ slowly _ retreats under the blankets, leaving the bowl untouched. 

__

Her eyes are unfocused but stubbornly fixed on the floor, the rest of her face hidden. Reuben wordlessly moves the bowl closer, jaw tight, then leaves. When he checks on her later, the bowl is empty. 

__

Unbeknownst to her, Reuben finds there  _ are _ moments when Andrea welcomes his care without reserve: several times, he carefully cleans her face with a wet cloth, and is free to observe her nostrils flare with relief in her sleep. 

__

This is all he gets at first, but slowly, she can’t seem to remain clear-headed enough to be as mean to him as she’d like to. 

__

On the second day, she looks to be in a deep sleep, the blankets up to her ears, when he catches a distinct smell. He thinks she wet the bed, and his heart sinks, taking this as a sure sign that her state is declining -but he frowns at a few dried flowers on the floor.

He kneels by the bed, quietly, and finds a jar hidden under it. Andrea removed the dried flowers it contained so that she could… piss in it. He’s not proud to admit to himself he didn’t think of everything.

__

When he looks up, the blankets have been pulled over her head, hiding her entirely. 

__

Quiet still, as if she was actually sleeping, he takes the jar outside and pours it all away. After rinsing it clean, he comes back, and places it back where she left it.

__

Another time, Andrea is lying on her side, her fingers weakly working at her braid. She breathes slowly, trying to tighten the braid, redoing it, clearly braving a sharp headache that makes it impossible for her to keep her eyes open. 

__

When she realizes he’s at the end of the bed, her fingers stop, and she  _ shyly _ hides her braid under her chin. 

__

Without ceremony, almost annoyed even though no one forces him to, Reuben sits next to her and removes her hand from under her chin, pushing it under the blankets, to pick the braid up where she left off. He’s a bit clumsy himself; the locks are humid with sweat in places. She doesn’t move. 

__

The braid done, her lips move mutely; he probably dreams the shape of a  _ thank you _ . Reuben leaves the room feeling strange. 

__

At no point can he bring himself to eat. Sleep is hard to find sitting on a chair, even to the faint, oddly soothing snore of his patient.

__

The closer he is to go get Susu, the more he imagines running away instead. He can’t bring himself to go to the village, terrified that the elder will say for some mysterious reason that nothing can be done. 

__

On the third day, Reuben can’t stand to be out of the room. So he sits on the floor, back against the wall, and watches her sleep.

__

Absently after a while, trying to put his hand on the knife he keeps on himself, he ends up emptying his pockets, including his jacket inside pocket. Confused, he finds a piece of paper, wondering first if he took it from Andrea’s notebook several days ago, then forgot about it. Unfolding it, however, he recognizes it. It’s the letter Andrea gave him during the tea ceremony, before their marriage. 

__

It just looks like a list to him. It doesn’t matter how long he looks at it, he’ll never know what’s on there unless someone tells him. 

__

Yet, he looks at it, his thumb tracing the words, and he keeps looking at it -until he glances up and meets Andrea’s sleepy eyes, fixed on him from the bed. 

__

He can’t hide the letter in time, or act as if he’s indifferent. Embarrassed to have shown curiosity for it, he looks away and folds it, when she says something, her mouth mumbling against the blankets, so low he frowns and leans forward -right as he understands that she said: “Throw it away.”

__

He hesitates, unsure if she knows what she’s talking about or even that she’s talking to him. 

__

“Why?”

__

Her heavy eyes seem about to close but they don’t leave his, and she just repeats after a long, long silence: 

__

“Throw it away, Reuben.”

_   
  
_

The letter is placed inside the stove that evening, to burn with the wood the next time he’ll use it. He’s not a stubborn man. 

__

That night, Reuben lies on the floor by the bed. Several times, he sits up in the dark and moves his face closer to hers, when her breathing is so quiet he thinks he can’t hear it at all. Eventually, sleep takes him.

__   
  


He’s boiling more leaves for her to drink in the morning, facing the stove, when the floor creaks on the other side of the wall. 

__

Andrea appears, avoiding his eyes. Her gait lacks the confidence she usually shows. Irritated, or embarrassed. Probably both. 

__

...he knows she feels better when she leaves the cabin without a word, the door left wide open behind her. Reuben doesn’t say anything, nor does he move to stop her. 

__

He sits down, feeling relieved, of course. 

This is a relief, he thinks again with a pang in his chest, watching her walk away into the field. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Darling, stop confusing me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNoo_rNZQ84)  
> With your wishful thinking  
> Hopeful embraces  
> Don't you understand? 
> 
> I have to go through this  
> No light, no air to live in,   
> I play dead   
> it stops the hurting.


	9. An itch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brief summary of what happens in the last chapter: 
> 
> > Because Reuben threw her notebook into the fire, Andrea stops eating his food. 
> 
> >As a result, she falls sick, to the point of being bedridden. 
> 
> >For three days, Reuben takes care of her. 
> 
> >While she's still sick, she softens and tells him to burn the letter she gave him when they met.
> 
> >As soon as she can leave the bed, Andrea is cold to him again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Three incredible artists have blessed us with their talents, and I can’t say how grateful I am that they did. I am begging you, if you have a minute, please, please, PLEASE go on twitter to let them know how talented they are.
> 
> [Kayurka’s art is of a scene from last chapter, when Andrea is on the floor, ill](https://twitter.com/Kayurka1/status/1313108442337423362)
> 
> [Bee_woop drew a cheeky Andrea stealing a chicken](https://twitter.com/bee_woop/status/1323976989217333249)
> 
> [Lilithsaur made a portrait of Andrea and Reuben, complete with chicken, blood and knife](https://twitter.com/lilithsaur/status/1325174709609062401)
> 
> That art truly helped me go on lol sorry for being dramatic. Thank you to those artists for being so kind. Lilith, I love you. Kayurka, you’re a blessing. 
> 
> Finally, you can browse the hashtag [“LetAndreaEatThemChicken” by zara_ardis on twitter^^](https://twitter.com/search?q=%23letandreaeatthemchicken&src=typed_query)… she is without a doubt Andrea’s number one stan, and I need many more people like her in the fandom. 

Andrea’s recovery isn’t immediate, and for a little bit, time follows an odd pace. 

For days, she leaves the bed and the cabin but doesn’t go far, and that’s exactly how Reuben can tell she’s not quite herself. The afternoons are endless. It reminds him of his first sips of liquor when he was eight. 

From the porch, he can guess her shape on the other side of the field. Instead of disappearing into the woods, she sleeps at the foot of a tree in the middle of the day. 

Every day she uses her own medicine and boils a few leaves in a pot to drink. She also makes a habit of sitting a few trees away from the greenhouse, where she looks closely at some of her flowers for hours, to draw them in her notebook. 

Past those first few days, he’s confident that she’s completely healed when she starts being mean again, even if her heart doesn’t seem to be quite in it.

Of course, these are things he’s grown to expect from her. Purely to aggravate him, he knows she’ll do the exact opposite of anything he suggests.

Mending the seam of a shirt by the lamp, one evening, he makes the mistake of absently appreciating that she came home before nightfall -and she instantly turns on her heels, striding out of the cabin. 

Still, whether she’s bored or distracted now, he observes that it does sometimes feel like she’s running out of ideas when it comes to showing that she hates him. 

There are still days where she leaves for hours, but other times, she still sits not too far from the greenhouse to draw flowers, her models laid out on a clean cloth on the grass. 

Reuben wishes he wouldn’t spare her a minute of his attention, a glance, but sometimes he can’t help it. Han used to draw trees and flowers too, and Reuben has never known what became of those drawings. 

So he slows to a stop on his way to the coop, to watch her just a bit, while she’s unaware. 

One day, she catches him, and he quickly looks away but not fast enough. She retaliates by promptly elbowing the chicken that was playing with her braid; the bird runs to him, cawing, to warn him of the danger. 

She’s not as disciplined as before. She used to rise at dawn and leave until dusk if not later, but now, she’s growing lazy, and he’s sometimes surprised to find her in some parts of the wood around the cabin when he thinks she left for the day. This is not the only change that occurs. 

Since living here she’s always been content to let Reuben take on every chore. Now, she suddenly needs to do everything herself. She won’t do anything for  _ him _ , of course, but she washes her own dress, socks, shorts, does her own dishes, fixes her own meals. 

For three days, she was bedridden and needed him to throw away her piss and braid her hair -and she’s determined to show that’s not the case anymore. 

Reuben wouldn’t be able to truthfully say he hated taking care of her, but no man complains about being relieved of a bunch of chores, especially the woman he does them for hates him. It’s welcome, surely, and nothing to be hurt over. 

When he sees one of her dresses hanging on the clothesline, when he finds the soap in the basin, when he removes the weeds on all fours in the greenhouse, sweating, he just huffs to himself trying to think of something else. 

While she doesn’t always leave for hours at a time like she used to, Andrea still avoids him like a breathing curse. When he’s inside, she eats on the porch. If he eats on the porch, she goes to eat on her bed. Many times, he thinks to himself that it’s a better situation than when she used to threaten his birds, and of course it is. It’s welcome, and nothing to be hurt over. 

Yet he’s a slow learner, and he has his moments of weakness. One early morning while she’s still at the stove, he doesn’t expect himself to suggest they go fishing together. He even has good reasons for it: she needs to know where the best spot is, to go alone, and what the fastest way to the river is; but she doesn’t hear those anyway, as she practically hisses at him the moment he opens his mouth.

There is no doubt: Andrea hasn’t changed her mind about this marriage, or him. 

Meanwhile, they continue to meet with Susu and Tahmele. Andrea usually stays quiet unless spoken to, which Reuben is grateful for; and he is well aware at this point that the sittings only serve to make sure neither of them has died, away from the village. 

They’re the reason they go to the village at all since the union; so while they’re pointless, Reuben still wakes up feeling a strange, cautious joy on the days they’re meant to go there. It should only be a matter of time before he’s allowed in the temple again. 

Yili comes back to lead a sitting with Susu after a few times; and they find soon enough that it’s for a reason. 

Reuben and Andrea haven’t seen her in weeks, but Yili doesn’t waste time making small talk. For a minute or two, the elder compares marriage to a garden while Susu smokes, and Reuben thinks they’re in for the usual speech -but Yili ends hers with a brief, simple instruction. 

“When you start the day, and before you go to bed, you’ll praise the look, character, or work of your spouse.”

He keeps his back straight next to his stoic wife, sitting still. His eyes find her profile, but there’s no sign there of anything other than indifference and boredom. 

Himself doesn’t feel any different than the previous times. All he and Andrea need to do is maintain the appearance that they’re doing what is asked, but the moment they leave Susu’s cabin, the only witnesses they have are each other, and Reuben has no intention to say a kind word to his wife -no matter who puts the idea in his head. 

On the way back to the cabin, he doesn’t change his mind, not even a bit; but he does wonder what he would say to Andrea, if he meant to follow Yili’s instruction. It’s an idle thought; it has no reason to be other than his propensity to exasperate himself. He finds anyway that he’s uninspired, uninterested, and unimpressed. 

He busies himself with everything he can think of for the rest of the day, to forget about it, and it does the trick just fine. Like every other day, he doesn’t say a word to her, even though he could if he wanted to because Andrea sits all day by the greenhouse to draw instead of leaving for the woods; he doesn’t even approach her in any way; he doesn’t look at her. 

Like every evening, he cooks his own meal, leaving her alone, unsure of where, what, or if she’ll eat. Then he eats by himself, at the table. 

Like every evening after supper, he sits on the porch to wash his face while the sky darkens, bent over the basin, to the sound of crickets and distant hoots.

Right then he catches sight of her, out of the corner of his eye. She’s leaving the small hut near the well, dropping the bucket to the ground, empty. When she moves in his direction, to go inside and go to bed, he presumes, he quickly averts his eyes and hides his face in a cloth to dry it. 

The hard, short heels of her shoes clack on the three steps to the porch shortly after, then across the floorboards. 

He turns his head at the last moment, just as she enters the cabin, walking out of his sight. 

“I like your pretty brown hair.”

Inside, her steps halt. 

Wincing, Reuben holds his breath and waits. 

For a moment, all he hears are crickets. Then, the heels of her shoes continue further inside across the floor, to the bedroom, away from him. 

Breathing out slowly, staring ahead at the field, he wonders if she heard him well. 

He stays for longer than usual on the porch while the night falls, quickly coming to the conclusion that he does not want to do this ever again, no matter the reason or circumstance. 

The thought is reassuring enough that he finally gets up, and goes inside to sleep. 

He cheats himself the very next morning by telling her that she has “lovely eyes”, right as she leaves the bedroom, before she’s had a chance to walk out of the cabin. 

This time her head jerks up like he’s struck her, and he steps back, startled by the reaction. She grits her teeth, seeming about to speak, but only puzzles him further by turning away and running out of the cabin instead, without a word.

He stands unscathed but confused, by his own actions more than hers, and decides for good this time that he’s done enough; repeating to himself all the reasons why he shouldn’t like a lesson learned by heart. 

Yet when Andrea comes home that afternoon, he boldly observes out loud how neatly done her braids are. 

She runs to hide at the sound of him, faster than she did the previous night. After a few beats of silence, her voice, muffled behind the wall, is blunt nonetheless. 

“Stop that.”

He doesn’t stop. 

The first few times, she’s as confused as him, he can tell, and he can’t blame her: his behavior makes so little sense. 

He catches her early in the morning, before she goes to bed, and all she thinks to do is run and hide; but soon, she falls back into her old habits and starts hissing harsh words at him again. It inexplicably does nothing to deter him. 

She tells him to  _ shut his mouth _ , to  _ stop it _ , that he’s an idiot, that he’s ugly; she looks him up and down snarling that she can’t stand to look at him, that she hates his voice, and everything he says and how he thinks, while the rest of the time she simply winces and frowns and huffs. 

He stammers at times, like a boy, about her  _ freckled face _ , her  _ pretty hands _ , her ankles, her waist, her neck, her nose; she hates it more and more, but the angrier she gets the stronger the urge to do it.

That itch he has to infuriate her by telling her she’s pretty is a riddle he can’t solve, and the satisfaction is too great for him to try. It doesn’t matter, he  _ has  _ to do it. 

The tacit understanding they share that he’s had to  _ look _ at her to praise her figure remains an afterthought,  _ of course _ ; just like he tries not to think too long about the places he had never thought to look at before, or whether or not she’s thought of him imagining what he can’t see. 

He’s wise enough to keep some things unsaid, particularly when she bends to pick the basin up or to untie her shoes.

Often, he has to bite his cheek after complimenting her, to not openly show her outbursts amuse him. Every time, he finds it increasingly difficult, and later impossible, to promise himself that he will stop eventually. 

At night, he lies thinking about what he said to her; about her brown hair, her small hand, about her scowl -and he can’t help the pinch between his ribs. 

The humor he finds in it during the day always seems to escape him once the night falls. 

Meanwhile, they still have to meet with the elders, but the next time they go, Yili is waiting for them on Susu’s porch.

At dawn, before they leave, Reuben comments on the shape of his wife’s lips, and in return she threatens to tell the elders everything they’ve lied about, then to set fire to the chicken coop. He doesn’t provoke her further. 

As a result, Andrea walks fast, well ahead of him, and she reaches Susu’s porch before him; but Yili stops her. She’s told to follow Yili to Osira’s cabin, the one they can see from Susu’s porch, on the other side of the glade. 

His young wife doesn’t question it; it’s all the same to her, of course; and before Reuben can ask why, Susu calls him inside. 

Without Andrea next to him, he fidgets on his chair, suddenly much more alert than he’s ever been during a sitting. Expecting the worst is not something he can unlearn at his age -but to Susu, it doesn’t matter. She lights her pipe and starts smoking with a sigh, like she always does. It turns out, the worst is not to come, but it is not something he’s prepared for. 

Right away, it’s all very clear what the next, neverending hour will be all about, as Susu starts enumerating to him with thorough descriptions every single routine, trick and habit she believes will get a woman to  _ accept _ her husband; meaning, to let him bed her. 

Reuben’s fists curl on his knees the moment the elder starts her lesson, and he keeps his lips tightly shut as if underwater, nodding at times but avoiding her eyes at all costs. Susu doesn’t share his embarrassment. 

Most of it is about getting his wife accustomed to his touch by _ holding her when she’s cold _ ,  _ kissing her hand when she serves him food _ ,  _ washing her feet after a day of chores _ .

Andrea would cut his fingers off for trying any of that, but he doesn’t say that to Susu. He just nods. 

He doesn’t try to deny what the elders guessed correctly either, which is that he’s never had Andrea -nor does he reveal that his wife has never served him food, or done anything in the home that could prompt a sudden display of affection. All of it is better left unspoken; he’d rather have the elders guessing than show evidence that his wife hates him as much as they apparently think she does. 

As if Susu could read his mind, she tells him: “You don’t need a  _ reason _ . Devotion and care aren’t rewards. Just pet her hair.” Then she adds, as an afterthought: “And be kind to animals. A man who treats animals kindly is trustworthy.” 

Reuben certainly doesn’t comment on this. 

With smoke pouring out of her mouth, Susu then quickly moves on to what seems to matter most in her eyes when it comes to marriage. 

“When she lets you bed her, give the lips between her thighs a good suck.  _ Then _ fuck her.”

Hoping they’re almost done, he runs a hand over his face while Susu continues:

“...If you get her to accept you  _ once _ , and you listen to what I say and bed her well, she’ll accept you many more times. She’ll accept you forever.”

There’s one proper way to make love according to Susu, and she graciously details it to him some more while he bears it in silence, the most important message being that no man can expect a woman to want more if there is nothing in it for her.

“Have you tried enticing her?” She asks as they both get up, Reuben more eager to end this than the elder is to stop talking. 

“I didn’t think of that,” he replies dryly.

“Show yourself to her,” is her final advice, leaning against the door to keep him from leaving just yet when he puts his hand on the handle. The words seem to have a hidden meaning of sort, until she adds: “Show your bare legs. Your arms. Your shoulders.”

Chin in, he waits until she removes herself from the door. After a beat, she does, right when he thinks of asking when he’ll be allowed to work on the boats again, at the lake. What he really wants to know is when he’ll be allowed back inside the temple, or to live in the village again; but Susu takes one step closer, her chin up. 

“ _ Your home must be in order first.  _ The rest can wait.”

Mouth shut again, Reuben hopes for more, but Susu is done with him, clearly, because she opens the door wide -and without insisting, he steps out. 

For years, building, cleaning and fixing boats was about all he was allowed to do to contribute to the life of the village. In truth, being useful that way was all that was left to give his life meaning for so long, and he thought his marriage entailed that he’d only become more involved. Marriage plants a man where he belongs, he was taught that. 

Yet, since his union with Andrea, Reuben has only been told to wait. Although he trusts the elders’ advice, and that there is no man more patient than he is, he still has to stifle the uneasiness growing inside. 

From Susu’s porch, he sees Yili walking out of Osira’s cabin, Andrea following her. Immediately his wife moves ahead and past the elder, without looking back. 

She doesn’t slow down to let him join her, naturally, heading north to go home, but he still sees as she passes how flushed pink her face is, her mouth in a frown. It seems she’s walking even faster if possible than on the way to the village this morning. 

Reuben doesn’t try to catch up to her. 

Trailing behind, he’s unable to think of anything but what Susu last said to him. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ Why do I do this to myself](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssOs48L89fU)


	10. Fear of heights

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two artists made more art for this story, of two scenes from the last chapter. I'm so fucking grateful for them, you have no idea. Once more, I'm begging you to follow them on twitter and let them know how much their talent is appreciated in this fandom.
> 
> [Reuben compliments Andrea by bee_woop](https://twitter.com/bee_woop/status/1329381385988169733%C2%A0)
> 
> [Andrea hisses at Reuben by bee_woop again](https://twitter.com/bee_woop/status/1329462019762905091)
> 
> [Andrea drawing flowers while Reuben watches from the porch by Selunchen](https://twitter.com/selunchen/status/1330907044145221633)
> 
> Thank you again to you both... It means the world.

After that one sitting with Yili in Osira’s home, Andrea becomes particularly short-tempered. Given Reuben’s experience with his young wife, that’s saying something. 

Her words are more cutting if possible, and somehow rarer too; and if she still doesn’t leave the cabin as often as she used to, unless Reuben imagines it, she seems intent on always sitting her back to him, looking, turning away from him. 

Other attempts to get to him over those few days are less subtle. In his absence, she eats all the eggs from the box he keeps them in; twice he finds his shirt in the mud around the well, instead of hanging on the clothesline; and anytime he catches her looking at him, if she ever does, her eyes flicker down or to the side in annoyance. 

One evening, she comes home well after nightfall, but he’s stayed up late at the table just to tell her before the day ends that the night air gave her cheeks a lovely pink, because he’s unrelenting -and she stomps her foot at the stove, lips pinched. 

But she says nothing. All she does is grab the leftover bread, tear it in half and shove a piece in her mouth, chewing on it like a starved fox. 

The ritual performed, he leaves the table with a faint grunt, to go to the corner of the room where he’s been sleeping since the union, and unfold the blanket. When she doesn’t leave the room despite his presence, he warns her, undoing the first button at his neck: “I’m going to bed.”

“I don’t care,” she tries to snap back with her mouth full, her back turned to him. 

“Just be quiet.”

She clangs the pot against the stove at that order, four times, getting him to grit his teeth at the sound. Then she lets herself fall on the chair, its legs scraping on the floor. Her _pink cheeks_ are bulging with bread, but she shoves more of it into her mouth. 

He turns to face the wall, pulling his shirt over his head. 

Behind him, the pot falls to the floor. When he turns around, she is nowhere in sight. 

When he manages to show himself capable of more common sense, Reuben stops thinking about his wife, or caring about where she is and what she does, what she thinks of him, and starts worrying instead about the fact that he still hasn’t been called to work by the lake, and won’t be for quite some time. 

The unease growing dimly in his stomach doesn’t leave him; not that day after the sitting, not the days after. 

He tries to be reasonable, and forget about the village and the boats. He tries to, yet whatever he’s doing, he gets lost in thought and comes up with all sorts of plans that might sway the elders to make a decision in his favor. He could build a small boat _here_ , and get Bilel and Flora to drag it to the village. They aren’t friends by any means but they’ll accept to do it for a boat anyway. Maybe he could talk to Yili alone, claim that Andrea misses the lake. 

None of the ideas he has sound convincing to him, but he still entertains each one of them to the point of fleshing them out in great detail. 

He loses track of time, gardening until his knees hurt, fishing until he’s sunburned, and one day, cutting so much wood deep in the forest that he struggles to push the wheelbarrow back to the cabin. 

He carries it all some distance away from the porch, close to the chopping block. He hates that his eyes search for Andrea as soon as he arrives. She’s nowhere to be found, naturally; not by the greenhouse, nor on the other side of the cabin, or anywhere near the chicken coop either. 

The heat, past noon, only adds to his irritation. The waistband of his pants holds his shirt tight just under his ribs, and he feels like he can’t breathe, sweating through it and huffing.

He nearly tears the collar at the seam pulling it over his head to remove it, and throws it to the ground, but even without it it feels like he can hardly breathe. 

So mechanically, to lose himself to the cadence of it, he pulls the axe from the chopping block, and swings it on a first log, splitting it in two. Then he does it again, and again, keeping at it, the chunks falling mutely onto the grass. 

Birds are chirping above his head. His hands are busy, but his mind doesn’t quiet down.

He means to chop wood for a few minutes, just enough to pile by the stove, but the repetition numbs him with memories of his father telling him to spread his feet, stand as far as possible from where the axe will strike, and let the weight of it do the work. 

Now Han is gone, and Reuben is swinging the axe the way he was taught, but mindlessly, chopping too many logs to store inside, his skin aflame under the sun.

For a second while catching his breath, his eyes ficker up to the cabin, then back down to the block -but he frowns, and looks up again. 

It looked like the shape of Andrea’s dress, behind the window, standing a bit on the side. He keeps his eyes on it, but whatever he thinks he saw, there’s nothing there now -so he looks away, and lifts the axe again. 

Before he brings it down, the door of the cabin swings open -and Andrea comes out on the porch. 

Hands on her hips, she looks at him with tight lips and a clenched jaw, then away, then at him again, then down. 

“Do you think you have enough of those?” She asks, gesturing at all the wood. “Are you done?”

He blinks, but before he can ask why she cares, she continues, huffing, her fingers gripping her hips. “That axe is useless. What are you waiting for to sharpen it?”

It’s quiet enough all around that he can hear her as clearly as if they were standing six feet apart. His shoulders drop. 

“...So you _have_ been watching me.”

“ _I’m not watching you,”_ she shoots back, but he feels strangely calm, and he just retorts in light defense: “If I don’t chop wood, who will? You?” 

She doesn’t say anything in response except shift on her feet. Every time her eyes find him she looks away. Something is clearly wrong, but he won’t hear a word of it if she doesn’t want him to. 

He doesn’t insist and starts picking up the chunks of wood fallen in the grass. “Not drawing any flowers today?” He hears himself asking, immediately regretting it.

She rearranges her hands on her hips again, her eyes down. “How many more times will we have to go to the village?”

Reuben turns back to face her. _Ah._

Yili apparently didn’t persuade her of her expertise on marriage. Not that anyone could persuade Andrea of anything. 

He throws a log back into the barrow, then points out the obvious. “It’s not up to me.”

It’s furtive, but she _pouts_ at that, her brow creasing. She pouts again and even harder when he says, even as he knows it’s hardly relevant: 

“One day we won’t have to walk there anymore, because we’ll be living there.”

“Keep telling yourself that.”

Reuben pauses, dread immediately blooming in his stomach. So he says nothing, and simply turns away from her, to return to his chore. A few chunks of wood are picked up and thrown into the barrow, then his shirt. It’s eerily quiet for some time, yet when he turns again, Andrea is shockingly still there, looking down right as he looks at her. 

The urge to speak is too strong, and he’s too weak. 

“My father knew _some_ things about flowers. He also had a few drawings.” After a beat, he adds lower: “I don’t know where those drawings went.” 

When she doesn’t react, still shifting on the porch, he goes to the barrow. Carefully, he lifts it and starts moving it closer to the porch, slowly. Andrea goes very still, her eyes down.

“He also taught me a few things about them,” he says again before he can stop himself. Fortunately, he still remains as vague as possible. “If you’re looking for a flower in particular, I might know where to find it.”

The last word is barely uttered that Andrea fidgets again. “I don’t care what your dead father like to draw--”

“We wouldn’t have to go look for them together.”

“--and there’s nothing I need to learn from you.”

He doesn’t know why he even tried, or what he expected. Putting his shirt back on, he mutters to himself: “Manners, for one.” But she hears him. 

“Ah, yes! ... _I should be like you_. Ever so patient and so kind to people who are undeserving.”

“Lucky for you, isn’t it?”

“--Let’s see if that gets you anywhere. Maybe after twenty years you’ll sway them with your good temper!”

The jab is too close to the truth not to hurt, and he has to pause again. After a beat, he still dumbly retorts the first thing he thinks of. “I suppose I should do it your way and be odious.”

“ _Odious_? ...Well that’s just not very patient and kind of you to say.” 

He can see her face better now that he’s closer. But what he sees doesn’t get him to understand why or how this even started, or why she’s still standing there when she hates even the sight of him. 

“What are you so fucking angry for?” He mutters again, knowing now she can hear him well with how silent the trees are. But then his eyes travel to her naked ankles, her shoes missing, and he asks before she can say anything. “...Is it that I didn’t comment on your pretty feet yet?”

“ _Stop that,_ ” she hisses, her toes flexing against the floor as if to hide under the ball of her feet.

“Stop what-”

He ducks _just in time_ , dodging the bowl he left on the porch by the rocking chair -the one Andrea throws at him without an ounce of hesitation. It lands a few feet behind him, in the grass.

She’s red with anger in an instant, and then, just as fast, she pales, taking one step back and hitting her hip against the rail. All Reuben has the time to do is blink before she bolts to the side of the cabin. 

One moment, she’s on the porch. The next, branches and leaves shake and sway. 

He’s stunned and dumb, standing there for a a minute before moving. Unsure, he follows where she went, until he’s right under the arms of the tallest tree bending over the cabin. The birds and cicadas on it have fallen quiet.

Looking up in slow, dazed disbelief, he sees her. 

Skirt pulled tight, her legs on each side of the branch she’s sitting on and her back against the trunk many feet above his head, catching her breath, her eyes closed.

Reuben can’t make sense of it; but she’s up there. She might as well have flown there. 

The lowest branch is far too high for her to reach it; it is far too high for _him_ to reach it. 

It means she ran to the coop; hoisted herself on top of it, then on the roof of the cabin; then jumped barefoot, as high as possible, to be able to touch that branch, let alone pull herself up on it. From there, she managed to end up on the branch above it. 

Well Reuben has been standing mouth open for a moment too long. She can stay there if she wants, he thinks as he snaps it shut. 

With half a shrug, jaw clenched and forcing a sigh through his nose, he walks away, returning to the barrow. 

There are many things to do around the cabin. 

Reuben moves some wood inside by the stove, and puts the rest in a corner of the chicken coop. He collects the eggs, then later the vegetables in the greenhouse, then takes care of the garden. For the remainder of the day, he promises himself he won’t check and see through the leaves where she is. In total, he only gives in four times, and over three hours later, Andrea is still in the tree. 

But he doesn’t care. He won’t try to talk to her, much less reason with her; he won’t give her an opportunity to insult him, and he won’t mull over this either -anymore than he already has _._

Inside the cabin, he goes to the window facing north, bends to look up at the tree, unable to find the branch she’s on at first before he catches sight of the hem of her skirt.

He huffs, and turns away to start preparing supper. 

Potatoes, carrots, an onion and spinach leaves are peeled and chopped and left on the stove in a pot filled with water. He uses the mortar to reduce the basil into a fine paste while it cooks, to add to the rest right before eating. It takes a certain time to do, but it doesn’t distract him. 

When the knife has been wiped clean, and the peels pushed off the table inside the bucket, the sun is going down in the sky, hiding behind the trees, and there’s nothing left to do but wait for the soup to be ready while the sky turns pink. So, with pursing lips, he gets up and goes to the window to find out. 

This time, he doesn’t have to search for long through the leaves. Her bare foot is in sight. Reuben curses under his breath.

Toes splayed, her foot is pointing down, but it doesn’t move. After just a moment, it suddenly goes back up, disappearing behind the leaves. 

He frowns, craning his neck to see better. Before too long, her foot reappears. 

The next branch is about four feet under it. It slowly moves down again, and soon Reuben sees the ankle, the calf, the skirt -but all of it comes to a stop. The foot trembles as it moves a bit to the left, then to the right, as if searching, before quickly going back up, where he can’t see it. 

“What?” He says in disbelief. 

His wife wasn’t being stubborn, he realizes, leaving the window for the door. She doesn’t know how to climb down the tree. 

Outside, the air is already fresher, the crickets already chirping. Reuben comes to stand by the trunk, many feet under her. 

She sees him when he appears, because she immediately turns her head the other way, her hand twisting her skirt tighter around her thighs, acting as if she’s simply enjoying the view. 

Her back right against the trunk, her legs folded, feet flat on the branch, pushing to keep balance, her nostrils flaring.

Not stubborn enough to stay in the tree, but too stubborn to ask for help. 

“How about you come sulking inside, the night is falling.”

She mutters something to herself. “I can’t hear you,” he says. She clamps her mouth shut. 

A short silence follows. He stands at the foot of the tree, hands on his hips, waiting for her to speak. When it’s clear she won’t acknowledge him, he walks away, and remarkably so even for a woman of her temperament, she doesn’t try to stop him. 

But he’s back a minute later anyway -with the ladder, heavy on his shoulder. 

“Don’t go the same way you went,” he says, leaning the ladder against the lower branch on Andrea’s side. With his foot, he kicks the first rung to make sure the legs of the ladder dig into the ground. Then, he looks up at her again. “Come down this way instead.”

The branch under the one she’s sitting on is still too low for her to simply change branches, then climb down the ladder. 

He’ll have to go up there, but he needs to assure there’ll be an understanding first. 

“Andrea.”

She exhales, closing her eyes, her mouth in a frown. 

“How do you plan on coming down once it’s dark?”

“I’ll--” She straightens her back, chin in, “I’m not coming down. For now.”

“What do you mean for now?”

“Later.”

“Later _when_? The night is falling.” 

“Yes, that’s fine,” she says; but he puts a foot on the first rung: “I’m coming.”

“Don’t make me climb to where you are, we’ll both fall,” he says when he’s at the top of the ladder, stopping when his knees are pressing against the first rung and the branch, his voice much less assured. 

He looks up slowly, careful to keep his balance. 

Andrea is sitting about four feet above his head, and from this close, he can see her hands splayed on the trunk by her hips twitch from the effort of sitting this way for hours. 

With a pained frown, she rolls her neck very slowly, her lips tightly shut. She straddles the branch again, skirt pulled tight and uncovering her knees, and puts her trembling hands in front of her. At least it means she’s aware she won’t be able to leave that branch on her own. But then, she stops moving. 

“Go on,” he tries. 

“Just---wait,” she tries as well with a small voice he’s never heard before. 

His arms are already up to help her slide off the branch to the one he’s leaning against, but the more they wait the less he feels confident about it. The sky is getting darker. 

“Andr--”

She leans forward, and suddenly both her legs are on the same side; she’s resting on her hips on the branch, her back to him. Her arms are trembling, even before she starts to slowly let herself slide down. 

His thighs are already straining, arms up in the air to grab her waist once he can, a hand lightly circling her ankle in the meantime, but she halts her progression, clinging to the branch. Before he can ask why, she’s already trying to pull herself back up, changing her mind. 

“No!” Reuben’s hand tightens firmly around her ankle, stopping her. Her foot jerks, her shoulders shake. “Don’t!” She gasps. “I’m--I’m not-”

“Keep going!” He cuts her off, pulling gently down on her ankle, causing her to shake harder -and yield, struggling but letting herself slide until she’s panting from fear, with only her hands clutching the branch tight, and not for long. 

He doesn’t waste any time and circles her thighs, holding them flushed against his chest, his nose pressed to her hip, half muffled by her skirt when he huffs at her to: “Lean against the trunk. Lean agai----Andrea, _let go!_ ” 

One of her hands leaves the branch, and he almost loses his balance --but that hand comes flat against the trunk, while the other lands on his shoulder, gripping it hard enough to hurt.

The moment her feet find the branch at his knees, they both pause, catching their breath, his hands not letting go of her waist, her hip leaning against his shoulder.

“All because I said your feet were pretty,” he groans low through his teeth. 

He carefully takes one step down the ladder, watching her knees shake as she bends them to put a foot on the first, then the second rung. 

“Why go up there if you’re afraid of heights? You’re trembling like a wet duck.”

“I’m not,” she stammers, slowly following him down the ladder, making no comment about his hand on her waist. He can’t say if she means she’s not afraid of heights, or not trembling, both equally ridiculous claims. 

Her knees wobble when she’s on the ladder, and even more so when she puts a foot in the grass. The muscles of her arms and legs must be cramping from being up there for so long, trying not to lose balance. 

He leaves the ladder there to watch her teeter her way back to the cabin in the dusk, following her. 

Inside, she lets herself fall on the chair at the table, wincing. After removing the soup from the stove and lighting up the lamp, he plunges a cup into the pitcher and serves her cold water. She accepts it without fuss, taking large gulps with her eyes closed. 

She doesn’t say anything either when he bends and lifts the hem of her skirt, just enough to have a look at her ankles and feet. It emboldens him to put his hands on one then the other, lifting them to check for cuts, finding none. 

Letting go of the skirt, he can’t help but quickly feel her hunched shoulder, her arm, watching her wince a bit, the muscle tensing in his palm -but she says nothing. Just as quickly, his hand slides along her arm to find her hand. He swiftly uncurls it in his palm to check for cuts again, then switches to the other one to do the same -and she lets him.

Finding nothing, he presses her palm to his mouth and kisses it. 

In an instant, she bolts to the other side of the room as if touched by lightning, the chair falling back to the floor. He stays where he is, his face immediately burning with shame. He doesn’t attempt to speak first. 

“ _Why_?” She cries. “Why are you doing this? Why are you making this so difficult?”

Even if he wanted to speak, he wouldn’t know what to say, it just felt like a moment too rare to pass on. The comfort of it was too intoxicating, maybe, but he should have known it wouldn’t last. There is nothing to say or do about it now. 

“I don’t want to be your wife,” she hisses, her eyes shining. Her hand, the one he kissed, is balled into a fist with white knuckles, trembling. “I will never be kind to you? _Give up!_ ”

He doesn’t move, and he doesn’t speak. Shifting left and right on her feet, she seems out of breath, and her voice quivers. “You’re lying to yourself about this. And you’re lying to yourself if you think they’ll ever let you live there again.” 

He thinks of the boats, of the endless planning he’s made to be allowed near them again. To be allowed in the temple again. 

Andrea comes closer, seeming to hurt herself saying it, shaking. He looks back at her but stays quiet.

“ _They married me to you to get rid of me._ Not to take you back!”

Finally, she storms out of the cabin. 

  
  


He doesn’t follow her. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [I am drowning](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QS27S3mspjU)
> 
> There is no sign of land
> 
> You are coming down with me 
> 
> Hand in unlovable hand
> 
> And I hope you die
> 
> I hope we both die


	11. Summer storm

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PLEASE, people, check out another art by [Bee_woop on twitter, and check out all her other reylo arts.... she's simply a gift, please let her know that.](https://twitter.com/bee_woop/status/1331629649223409665)
> 
> I'm also begging you to check out what [spiritusmovensx made to illustrate the last chapter :')](https://twitter.com/spiritusmovensx/status/1331711834735439873)
> 
> Thank you so so much to you both, and to everyone reading this story. 
> 
> Reminder because I update slowly and it’s been a while: 
> 
> 1\. The tags haven't changed; mind the tags.
> 
> 2\. Reuben’s first wife’s name is Wilo, and she died giving birth to their daughter, bleeding out in their bed. 

Reuben stops telling his wife she’s pretty. 

Spending his entire time plotting what he’d say to her next for over two weeks has been enough for him to grow used to that routine, and to the bickering that would follow his praise. All of it stops altogether. 

He doesn’t suggest again they go to the river together, and he stops trying to get her to eat what he cooks. He also avoids looking at her at all, or watching where she goes and when, even if he can’t help but wonder most of the time. 

The morning after Andrea climbed the tree, he’s at the table, the bucket between his feet, mashing the bread he left to soak overnight for the chickens; and she’s at the stove, stirring her leaves and flowers very slowly inside the pot, eyes down -as if listening closely. 

But all there is to hear are the sounds of the wet bread in his hand, and of the wooden spoon grazing the bottom of the pot. He catches her pursing her lips, but nothing more. Later, she leaves the cabin with her bag and her jars.

The first few days, they don’t exchange a single word -not that they need to. Reuben goes to the river alone, to fish, and he does his chores alone. 

For once since the marriage, he’s reminded of just how quiet the cabin can get. Even in the evening, Andrea seems to not turn in the bed as much as she used to, and at night, it almost feels to him like the forest holds its breath. 

The silence ends up being broken, though, as he eventually finds himself having to talk to her after all --because the bucket one day, or the basin the next; or the soap, the brush; or whatever tool it is that he needs, are suddenly  _ never _ where he always leaves them. 

The first time he can’t find the bucket, he doesn’t think to ask Andrea where it is. He looks for it everywhere, in the coop, in the greenhouse, looking around the well, near the clothesline -until he finally spots it behind the bed. He doesn’t question why he finds it there, and he doesn’t mention this to her. 

But things he needs for his daily chores just keep getting misplaced more and more. If he can find them first, he prefers not to ask Andrea where they are; but it does get boring fast, and just like that, despite himself, he’s back to test Andrea’s short temper all over again, bothering her about his tools.

She scowls, frowns, mumbles that she has no idea where  _ his things  _ are, sighs and rolls her eyes, but he merely repeats to put things back where they belong. The frown at her mouth deepens, but she doesn’t say anything. 

He hasn’t seen her for hours when he leaves the coop one afternoon, looking for the bucket that he usually leaves on the porch. 

He spots it by the well, and heads there with a sigh. On his way, he hears a sound coming from the small hut where they wash, so he’s careful not to look, even if it’s likely just a chicken. Then, he freezes. 

Several bloody rags, some dry, others showing a fresh, vibrant red, have been thrown inside the bucket. He grabs it, his heart pounding, and calls her before he can think. 

“Andrea…  _ Andrea!! _ ”

A thump comes from the hut, and Andrea emerges, tying the end of her braid, with her wheat colored dress on ---unharmed. “What?”

Confused, Reuben shows the content of the bucket: “What happened?” 

Her face instantly turns crimson. 

“ _ What happened _ ,” she parrots, walking fast to him, “what happened… Nothing that isn’t meant to happen!” 

He opens his mouth but she snatches the bucket from his hands, hissing. “ _ What happened.” _

Only when she quickly gathers all the rags, throwing the bucket aside, does he slowly realize what those are. A quiet  _ oh _ falls from his lips as he stands there, dumb, his face growing hot. “I thought you killed another chicken,” he lies. 

This isn’t what she needed to hear, apparently, because she explodes. “Oh! Oh!! ...You and your fucking birds!!!” 

She’s fuming again, but he’s distracted, still coming back from the shock of seeing blood where and when he didn’t expect it; and when she swears over her shoulder, taking the rags with her, that she hopes his chickens chop him into pieces in his sleep, and turn  _ him _ into a soup, he can’t hold back a breathless laugh in time, covering his mouth. “You would sit at the table,” he says to her. 

“I wouldn’t! I would let them finish their meal!!” She’s about to go inside, then turns to add: “And then I would kill and eat all of them!!” 

The door slams shut behind her; birds leave the trees; and all that lingers after that is the blood on the rags. His smile slowly fades. 

Standing there alone, he tries to fight back images of a bloody bed, but the dark spirits never let him forget. These rags at the bottom of the bucket could have been made out of Wilo’s sheets. 

He used to be terrified of going near the well he built. Terrified of losing his balance and falling in its pit, never to be found or remembered by anyone. But solitude always turns out to be the greater threat. He’s stopped hating the idea of a fall a long time ago. 

After the door slams shut, Reuben sits on the edge of the well and thinks of Wilo until the sun burns the skin of his neck.

For the rest of the day, he doesn’t think of anything else; and during the following days, his head is full of what he had and how it all began, the life he and Wilo thought they’d have together, and how it all ended. 

Andrea keeps misplacing things around the cabin; but he tries to avoid her, and they rarely speak. Meanwhile, they still must go to the sittings, no matter how much she hates going, and how seemingly difficult it’s become for her to hide it. 

Tahmele replaces Yili once more, and it doesn’t make much difference at all to Reuben, if not for the hope he hasn’t been able to kill that unlike Susu, Yili would maybe allow him to work on the boats again if he asked her. And he can’t ask her, because Yili is not there.

Andrea fails to appear like she’s listening as well as she used to in the beginning, and Reuben tries to soften her curt words to Tahmele’s queries by mumbling a few reassurances, but his heart isn’t in it. 

This is not a drastic change from a few weeks ago, but if he notices it, he’s sure the elders notice it too; his attempts are far from being enough to distract them from Andrea’s many silences; and one day, in the middle of a sitting, Susu asks:

“What did you do?”

Her eyes are on Reuben. Instincts of his previous life as a rabbit tell him not to move. “...Huh?” 

Bored, maybe, but mostly annoyed, Susu turns to Andrea instead: “What did he do?”

“Nothing,” his wife mumbles. 

“Nothing? Is that why you’re in a mood, because nothing happened?”

“I’m not in a  _ mood _ ... I’m naturally disposed that way,” Andrea says, but the elder looks back at him. 

“Reuben.”

“Susu.”

“How would you treat Wilo?”

He hopes nothing shows, but a sharp pang nearly steals his breath at the sound of that name. He can’t remember when is the last time someone said it out loud, and he forgets the question entirely. “What?”

Susu’s pipe is forgotten on the tea table. Tahmele has her usual level stare, and Andrea stays quiet next to him. Susu purses her lips. “Andrea, wait on the porch.”

No need to say it twice. Without a glance at anyone, Andrea gets up and walks to the door, leaving the room. 

Once it closes behind her, Susu leans back in her chair, fixing the scarf covering her hair. Reuben expects a long speech, and he doesn’t relax. His instincts don’t fail him; Susu doesn’t change her question. 

“Reuben. How did you treat Wilo, all those years ago?”

He thought it was just the sound of her name, but his heart is beating fast and not slowing down. “A lot like I treat  _ her _ ,” he says with a nod at the empty chair next to him. 

“Really?” 

He swallows, his hands carefully splayed on his knees. If this is a test, he doesn’t know what is expected of him. All he knows is he would like for Susu to stop saying Wilo’s name. 

“What is the difference then?” She asks.

“The difference is…” His eyes search Susu’s jars, as if trying to find on the shelves what the elder wants to hear. His voice is barely audible when he finishes his thought, his collar suddenly too tight. “ ...one liked it. The other doesn’t.” 

“Why is that?” 

This time, he tries to speak, but the words die right on his lips. Unfortunately Susu still catches the shape of them, because she leans a touch forward: “What? ...Reuben, what were you trying to say?”

His eyes are burning, but he feels caught. There’s no one to turn to again, and nowhere to go. “Wilo loved me.” 

“How come?” 

“There was no reason,” he murmurs. “She just did.”

“But she’s dead.” 

His thumb twitches, breaking the smoke dancing over his hands. 

“...You can’t make a dead woman love you,” Susu says. “You have a new wife now, who’s alive.”

Reuben doesn’t move at all. Tears fall but he doesn’t make a sound, waiting for Susu to go on with whatever lesson she’s trying to teach. Yet the silence stretches for quite some time, and both elders seem to have all the patience in the world for it -but Reuben doesn’t utter another word about Wilo. 

Eventually, Susu moves on to the practical, the usual, and the salt on his skin has dried by the time Tahmele sighs, signaling the end of today’s sitting. By then Reuben doesn’t care to be cautious anymore, and he asks Susu without detour or manners if he can work on the boats again. 

She ignores him completely, and orders him to wait outside, so she and Tahmele can talk privately.

His jaw locks as he gets up, to make sure nothing he’ll regret saying spills out of his mouth. He feels like he can breathe again once he’s out on the porch. But not for long. 

Andrea is standing two cabins away on the edge of the clearing, her mouth and brow soft. She’s leaning against the rail at the bottom of the steps, leading to the porch. Her head cocked. Not smiling, but listening.

And two men are with her. Talking to her. 

They’re having a conversation. 

Reuben stares, rooted to the spot on Susu’s porch. It’s still so early, they don’t usually meet anyone on their way to and from the village. 

Both men are about his age, no hats on, arms crossed, standing quite close to her, closer than strangers do. The sight strikes like a kick in the lungs, and when Andrea looks up, both men turn around. They don’t look surprised.

Reuben hears himself say “We’re done,” but it’s a poorly casted line, and it gets him no reaction from his wife, but a special attention from the two men. 

“Three of our daughters have been ill, two days after you’ve walked inside the temple,” one of them says, by way of introduction. Reuben doesn’t recognize either of them, but evidently, both know exactly who he is. 

“Andrea,” Reuben just says, taking a step down from the porch, hoping to leave. But Andrea’s face is a mask. And she doesn’t move.

“Zoë’s teeth aren’t coming in, and my sister’s daughter jumped into the lake and almost drowned,” the same man continues, “...every week, there’s something new. Why do you think that is?”

“Andrea, I’m done,” Reuben repeats, glancing at the other cabins around the clearing, while the other man casually explains: 

“...Because when they come here, he drags a black spirit with him. That’s why.”

Reuben feels his teeth grind slowly, yet he doesn’t retort anything, and for a reason he can’t explain, he just can’t bring himself to leave without his wife. The humiliation would burn too much. 

Yet, he’s willing to embarrass himself and call her name a third time, but before he does, Andrea rearranges her skirt, dusts it off -and finally walks away from her companions. 

He starts walking. Behind him, the first man concludes: “Until next time, then. But you can do what’s right” --and Reuben feels his lips curl tight against his teeth, still he doesn’t turn around. He takes the anger with him and away from the village; and Andrea follows behind. 

For a long moment, they walk in silence through the forest -but the burn inside doesn’t die out, even if he wants it to, and he soon can’t fight off the urge to speak. 

“I regret interfering. I wouldn’t want to keep you from making friends,” he says, bitter to the core, deluded enough to believe this’ll somehow hurt her feelings.

As if she expected him to say those exact words, she immediately shoots back: “Whether you would or not has little to do with anything. I’ll do what I want.”

“Don’t trust just anyone, or just anything they say.”

“Shouldn’t I be friendly to my future neighbors?”

No one knows better than he does that Andrea has no dream to be neighbourly to anyone; yet, he still bites. “I didn’t know you  _ could _ be friendly. It’s a side of you I had yet to see, I’m pleasantly surprised.” The rest comes before he can stop himself. “...You just don’t want to be  _ my  _ friend.”

He doesn’t look back at her, the sting lingering, becoming even sharper the longer she stays quiet.

“And I would be an idiot to have any hope left,” he says again. Because he is an idiot. 

Once at the cabin, Reuben makes a deliberate effort to busy himself, away from her, to not give in again and try to talk to her. They don’t speak for the rest of the day.

The next day, when he finds the basin in the  _ coop _ after looking for it everywhere, he almost loses his mind. 

Instead of going to her, he gathers the soap, the bucket, the basin, the mortar -everything Andrea has misplaced during the past week, and hides all of it under the wheelbarrow, turned upside down by the greenhouse. He thinks he’s teaching her such a good lesson by doing that. 

So he can’t say why, then, he ends up looking around the cabin to make sure she’s nowhere near that afternoon, and soon finds himself in her bedroom.

After a quick search into her baskets, then under the bed, then under the mattress --he finds her notebook. 

It’s unclear in his mind, what he wants to do with it or why; what he hopes to get out of hiding it and have her search it, what he hopes she’ll do; because past experiences indicate nothing good could come out of it.

Frustration grows stronger in him, and he wishes he would tear it all up, the notes and the drawings, instead of pausing once more to look at them, his breathing slowing down. He hates the flowers she drew in there, he thinks, and he hates the words she wrote next to them that he can’t read.

He flips through it all repeating to himself that he hates what he sees, and at the end of the notebook, after many blank pages, he finds one last drawing. Just a tree, with a ladder. Nothing else.

He stares at it, and then remembers what she said to him that evening. The urge to vengefully tear the notebook up comes back, his tongue bitter all over again, but he jerks his head up at a sound coming from inside. 

Then, she’s there, standing by the wall, stopped in her tracks; and he hides the notebook behind his back, trapped. What was the plan here? He doesn’t even know. 

“What are you doing?” She asks. She looks over at her baskets, at the bed, then at his arm folded behind his back. “What’s behind your back?”

“Nothing,” he says, annoyed and ashamed all at once to be caught here, and to even care that he’s caught. 

So, holding in a huff, he drops the notebook onto the bed and leaves the room, passing her. He’s not there to see how she reacts to that. 

He expects her to follow him, or later to go find him. When she doesn’t, he expects that the same evening she’ll make a few threats and stomp her foot. When she doesn’t, he can’t explain the ache, but he swears to not humiliate himself further . 

In the morning, when she asks him where the basin is, he dumbly tells her to look under the wheelbarrow; avoiding her eyes. He doesn’t see her use it. 

Over the next few days, the silence in the cabin grows thick, hard to swallow, but Reuben resists making a fool of himself more than he already has; and at night, he dreams of a bloody bed again.

The next time they go to the village, Yili is back. 

Right away before the sitting begins, and against his better judgement, Reuben tries to pull her aside to ask her about the boats, like a dog unable to let go of a bone -but she shuts him down in front of Susu and Andrea. “We’re not wasting time with this today,” she says without looking at him, gesturing at the chair for him to sit and be quiet.

They’re all the same people, in the same room, at the same hour. Nothing is out of the ordinary, until Yili sits across him and asks him, very matter-of-factly:

“Have you touched her yet?”

Nevermind  _ ordinary _ . Something new, cold, creeps up his spine. Andrea doesn’t react. Neither of them move.

“Who?”

“Have you touched your  _ wife _ ?”

“Yes.”

“Have you had her?”

“No.”

“No?”

“Did you ask if I’ve  _ had _ her?”

“That is what I just asked you, Reuben, yes.”

“Then no.”

“ _ Why _ ?”

Reuben holds his breath, thinking wiser to think first, even if he doesn’t know why he must spell out what Yili can clearly see. A side glance tells him his wife feels the same. Andrea is as still as a painting, face blank, but her hands are gripping the chair on each side of her dress.

“You don’t want him to have you,” Yili says, as if just figuring it out, now looking at Andrea. “Do you?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Andrea stays still and quiet, but Yili isn’t budging either. A stiff shrug is all the elder gets.

Yili clicks her tongue. “There’s always a reason. Nothing that can’t be fixed. What is it about him?”

Voice level, eyes unblinking, Andrea says: “He didn’t woo me.”

“Do you like when he kisses you?”

“He doesn’t kiss me.”

Yili turns to him. “Why do you not kiss her?” 

“She doesn’t even want me to hold her hand--” Reuben starts, and Yili looks back at Andrea: “Why do you not let him kiss you?”

“--who’s thinking about kissing?” He lamely finishes. Distantly, he sees that it’s not even a question to anyone here that he would kiss her if he could. At the same moment, Andrea agrees: “I don’t want him to.”

“Why not?”

“His breath stinks.” 

Andrea’s voice is a flat lake, but Reuben recognizes the fire growing slowly inside. He gives this no reaction, and Yili turns to him again. 

“Reuben is that true?”

“She can’t know that, because she never comes near me,” he says, and he hates how he sounds saying it. 

It’s evident at this point that all he and his wife will do here, is throw the ball back and forth in the hope that the lightning will strike the other. It feels like walking blind in the forest at night; he can’t figure out where this is going. 

“You don’t go near your husband?”

“I go as near as needed.” 

“But not near enough that you can kiss.” 

“So?” 

Yili leans forward, her weak eyes staring right at Andrea. “Why do you not let your husband close?”

“Sometimes two souls aren’t a good match.”

“But your soul doesn’t match any of the husbands’ we give you.”

What was maybe meant to be a smile curls into a wince on Andrea’s face. “...The next one will be the one, I’m sure.” 

Since he was a boy Reuben has never seen Susu be so still; and himself can’t help but breathe slow, hoping to be forgotten, watching it all unfold from up close.

“If you count on this union to end like the others,” Yili slowly warns, and Reuben’s eyes flick up to her, “little girl, you don’t know what your husband has been through.”

Reuben stares at the elder. Next to him, Andrea shifts on her chair.

_ Where are we going? _

“Why would this union ever break? Give me a reason,” Yili insists.

“Because I don’t want to share the bed and he’ll grow tired of that.”

“We don’t get along,” Reuben tries, but the elder ignores him: “As is natural for a man to grow tired of it. Why do you not lie with him? Why not?” 

“I told you.”

“...How do you intend to bring forth a child, if you don’t lie with a man first?”

A long, long pause follows. Thick, like the air before a summer storm.

“The next one will be the one, I’m sure,” Andrea repeats. Showing nothing, yet the message is clear.

“What if your mother had behaved the way you do?” Yili asks. “Where would you be now?”

The two women talk one after the other, back and forth, but it feels to him like he’s watching ripe fruits being thrown at the wall. He can now clearly hear the edge in Yili’s voice.

“How do you explain that young girls in this village bear their first child at fifteen, and she’ll soon be twenty and untouched? ...How disgraceful is that?” 

Reuben lowers his eyes. Images of the little girl he pulled from the river flash in his mind. He prays Andrea doesn’t say anything stupid.

“We don’t get along,” he murmurs dumbly, his neck turning into stone. Yili’s eyes stay on Andrea while she explains, calmly: 

“She doesn’t get along with anyone. It doesn’t matter who we marry her to. Does it?” She pauses, then simply says: “No. It doesn’t. Because she  _ is _ the curse.”

The words are like syrup in his mouth, choking him.

“Isn’t it true, Andrea?” Yili insists.

When he looks at his wife again, she hasn’t lowered her eyes, or her chin. But her lips are wet with tears.

“I bear part of the blame,” Reuben tries, right as Andrea licks her lips, then says to Yili: “If you say so, then it must be true.”

“She’s young,” he tries again, willing to say whatever he can think of to distract Yili, but the elder shuts him down. “Be quiet.”

For a good moment, only silence follows. Andrea sits her back right against the chair, right there in the open to be attacked, obviously expecting to be, and the elder seems to soften somewhat when she sniffles. “Look at me.” 

Andrea slowly looks up at the elder again, hot drops falling from her chin.

“Is it because of how your husband’s first wife died?” Yili asks, and Reuben’s skin feels as if it’s suddenly pulled taut, his chest hardly moving. “...Are you scared the same will happen to you? Is that it?”

Andrea sniffles again with a swallow, then clears her throat. 

“I don’t give a fat shit about his dead wife.”

She’s given a second, then, after Yili swiftly removes her braided shoe, to cover her head with her arms in time and bend in half on the chair. 

The next moment, the elder is on her, striking her with it, on the shoulder, the head, then the naked skin of her neck, then her head again; Andrea tries to move her hands where Yili will aim but it rains down fast, so fast Reuben grabs the elder’s wrist only after several strikes. 

“Yili!”

Yili’s free hand hits him across the face in response, nearly on the eye, and he lets go. 

The elder steps back for the briefest moment, catching her breath, eyes dark. 

Susu hasn’t moved from her chair.

Face red and wet with tears, Andrea looks up with an arm folded over her head. “...You’re done?” 

Yili immediately raises the shoe above her to resume, but stops when someone knocks at the door, getting all of them to turn their heads at once. 

“Susu, let me inside.” 

The voice is a man’s, and not one Reuben recognizes. There’s no lock on the door, but no one is to walk inside an elder’s home without being invited to.

“No,” Susu coolly says -but behind the door, the man insists: “Who’s with you, Susu? Let me in.”

“You’re not coming in,” Susu says at the stranger, but her voice is buried under Reuben’s, who rises suddenly from his chair, his lungs burning, when Yili strikes Andrea again without warning.

“Yili!!”

The elder turns to him in a flash. “ _ Sit down! _ ”

He falls back down on the chair, hands balling into fists, and the elder unleashes her anger on him instead: “Will  _ you _ knock some sense into your wife, if you don’t let me? Idiot! How do you think you’ll ever walk into that temple again if you don’t bring a child there by the hand?”

“...What?” Reuben’s heart beats wildly, and next to him Andrea arranges her hair with a trembling hand. Yili, meanwhile, keeps going. 

“You don’t know what a beating is. You don’t know what a real curse is… When you need to give a child and you  _ can’t _ . You’d both need to go through what your mothers, what your aunts went through, all of us who are the reason you exist!”

Reuben tries to process the words, when Yili turns to spit the rest at his wife.

“We should let her go to waste! To rot away where nothing grows… That is clearly what she wants, and where she belongs!”

Andrea sniffles, then looks right at Yili, her eyes red, half closed. “...Are you done?” 

When Yili hits her hard across the head, Reuben jumps to his feet. Right then, the door opens. 

A man about his age is standing there, about to speak. Others are right outside, but Reuben doesn’t see them. Susu doesn’t have the time to say a thing. The man doesn’t either. 

Reuben barrels into him like a storm, teeth bared, his two fists catching his collar to lift him off the floor. The stranger’s waist hits the rail, and Reuben sends him over it to land like a doll in the grass, nearly breaking his neck. 

The three men waiting at the bottom of the steps all move back, then rush to help the fourth to his feet. 

“You were told not to come in,” Reuben explains with a ragged breath in the silence of the clearing, his heart beating out of his chest as he slowly steps down from the porch -the men moving back as he does. 

One of them is young, maybe not even twenty. They’re not running away, but none of them say a word, eyes fixed on him like he truly is a black bear, and none of them come near him.

The one he sent over the rail is catching his breath and clutching his arm, hair falling across his eyes. “You were told not to come in,” Reuben repeats, as if to himself. 

When he looks back behind him, Susu is standing in the doorway, watching, her face unreadable. He can’t say what she’s seen, but he gets no reprimand from her. 

“Andrea,” he calls, his eyes burning, blood boiling, but trying not to do anything about it. 

He hears his wife walk across the floor from inside before she appears in the doorway, face flushed from her crying but kept blank; Susu steps aside without a word. No signs of Yili. Probably for the best. 

“Have a good day!” Andrea rasps as she passes the men standing there. Reuben’s nape prickles as they both walk away, into the woods, and until he’s sure no one is following them he keeps his fists clenched. 

Away from the men, from Yili; away from the village. 

After that, his legs move on their own. His face becomes numb, and it all feels like it was a dream, like everything is fading into a blur; but Andrea’s voice keeps pulling him out of it. 

She’s a bit behind him, sneering quietly at the trees, holding in more tears, talking to him or to herself, he can’t even tell the difference. She keeps trying to dry her face with her sleeves, muttering low the same words over and over. “Try it then. Try it. See what happens... I can marry fifty more men. I’ll marry a hundred. Watch me.” 

“There’s some soup from last night,” he hears himself say, absently. 

“It’s just a matter of time. It’s  _ only _ a matter of time. One of us will have to break. You will, or they will--but you want to know who won’t?”

“It’s in a jar in the well... You can have it. I’m not hungry.”

“You want to know who won’t? ... _ I _ won’t. I won’t be the one to break. So, you decide who breaks first. You or them, because  _ it won’t be me _ .”

He keeps on walking, while Andrea repeats  _ not me _ to herself, over and over, until it all quietens down to sniffles. He can’t look at her, and when they get to the cabin, she doesn’t go to the well to pull the soup out of it; she doesn’t go inside to eat. She goes further into the woods, away from him. 

As if it was a day like the others, he goes to sit on the porch to untie his shoes. Then, he doesn’t get up. 

All morning, then all afternoon, he stays in the rocking chair, in the shade. His hands stay on his knees, his eyes on the open field. The sun blinds him for hours until it slowly sinks to the edge of the trees. 

Most of what was said today, he knew about. 

Everything Andrea has said to him, ever, he’s known it to be true. He just couldn’t help but want them to be different. But they’re not. 

The air turns colder then, and the night is falling when Andrea is crossing the field, coming back, face swollen with salt, legs tired, her eyes down.

He doesn’t usually wait on the porch at this time of day, or really ever. But today isn’t an ordinary day. 

Birds are quieter. Crickets are shy. His face is still warm from the sun -and he feels hollow. He stares at the dark when he speaks to her, the moment she’s within earshot, and she stops there on the steps of the porch. 

“When it is most likely they’ll accept the request, I’ll ask Yili and Susu to break the union.”

He doesn’t look at her but he waits for her to speak if she wants to. Nothing comes.

  
  


“It won’t happen tomorrow. But I will ask them to. 

Just be patient.” 

  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Didn't I do it for you?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZruInYsvwuY)  
> Why don't I do it for you?  
> Why won't you do it for me?  
> When all I do is for you?
> 
> They want to see us, want to see us alone  
> They want to see us, want to see us apart


	12. The shadow of her hand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two small reminders/recaps for this chapter: 
> 
> During Chap.8 “Strange”:
> 
> >Andrea eats one of Reuben’s chickens.  
> >Reuben throws her notebook into the fire, burning a few pages  
> >For days, Andrea refuses to eat anything he cooks  
> >One day, she returns sick from the forest.  
> >She’s bedridden for 3 days, while Reuben nurses her back to health. 
> 
> Last chapter: 
> 
> >It’s confirmed that Andrea doesn’t want to be a mother, and that her husbands broke every union because of it.  
> >Yili scares Reuben saying that without a child, they’ll never accept him back into the temple.  
> >The chapter ends with Reuben promising Andrea that he’ll ask the elders to break the union.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Lapinrose made only the best meme for this fic, let her know if you relate at all ^^](https://twitter.com/lapinrosewrites/status/1357689684680314880). I’m reading her fic [Courtship](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22817464/chapters/54528931) if you don’t know about it (mind the tags!!)... *highly* recommend.
> 
> [Kayurka, the purest soul in the fandom, made art for the fic again, this time portraying Andrea. I can’t handle how much I love it, please check all her art on twitter, you won't regret it.](https://twitter.com/Kayurka1/status/1355242366089777152)

The night following his promise to Andrea, Reuben doesn’t sleep. 

On the hard floor he dreams awake of the little girl crossing the river. He’s never thought to ask Susu what became of her; if she’s been in good health at all since. 

At dawn, Andrea is already sitting by the greenhouse. She’s not drawing, or looking at her plants, or preparing to leave for the forest. She stares at the open field, her back against the tree. 

From the porch, he sees her. To not do the same, he simply returns inside. 

Once the elders break their union at his request, Andrea will be married to another man in about a few months. 

But Reuben can’t be thinking of that. There’s no time to dwell on this, sit and stare into space; other things can’t wait, and he reminds himself they matter more than the state of a marriage that was never meant to hold. 

He needs to gather the eggs, then weed the garden and the greenhouse; he needs to pick the first strawberries on the opposite end of the field, in the woods, and boil them in three or four of his jars with a few spoons of sugar. His spring clothes need washing, the stove needs cleaning; he has to tie the tomatoes, clean the coop, sweep the floor, and add another shelf above the window.

For several days, he skips meals and hardly sleeps; but every chore is well taken care of, and ahead of time too. 

Andrea seems to not know what to do with herself, and he tries not to think about that. They don’t speak, but this silence is fitting. There is nothing left to say. 

One afternoon, the heat lands flat in the field, and Reuben finds himself cleaning the coop again, sweating in no time through his shirt. But this time, after changing the straw, throwing the shit outside and covering the ground with a fresh layer, he doesn’t try to stop himself. 

He kneels, and crawls inside, shifting to lie on his side, folding his legs enough to fit and face the wall, away from the opening. Above his feet are the two evening roosts his chickens perch on to sleep; above his head are the boxes where they lay their eggs. 

He doesn’t mean to stay there; but when he opens his eyes, his shadow on the wall has grown darker. 

“Reuben?” 

His heart misses a beat, but the surprise fades right away; he’s too numb to move. Her voice comes from behind him. She must be standing right outside the enclosure. 

His vest on the roof of the coop is surely what gave his presence away.

He doesn’t turn around, pushing out the word, his voice weak with disuse. “What?”

“What are you doing?”

“Resting.”

He listens, waiting for her to leave; then realizes after a moment that she already did.

His shadow on the wall moves ever so slowly. At times, a chicken clucks with distrust outside, and he wonders if it means Andrea isn’t far. 

Other times, the bucket is dropped on the porch, on the other side of the cabin; footsteps can be heard across the floorboards through the wall; or Reuben thinks he hears her  _ skirt _ , and he can’t help opening his eyes a bit, waiting, listening.

He wants to stay just a bit longer; until seemingly out of nowhere, it’s dark out.

It’s a starless night. Above his feet, he can barely trace the faint shapes of his seven chickens aligned on the roost to sleep. 

Someone with a thumb had to unlatch the gate to let them in. It’s enough to get him to think of Andrea some more, and wonder if she came to see if he was still in the coop when the night was about to fall. 

What Andrea doesn’t know is that this has happened before. Reuben has slept in the coop more times that he’d like to admit over the years, when he wouldn’t eat or wash himself, or find the strength to care about the garden or the greenhouse. He’d leave the gate open and crawl inside to sleep. The difference now is that someone is here to witness it. 

At dawn, he’s pulled out of a light sleep by her voice again. 

“Reuben?”

Once more, he stays still. He knows what this is about; it’s already time to see the elders.

“Yes?” He rasps. 

Behind him, the chickens grumble at the gate, disappointed with him, waiting for someone to open the gate; except for one, laying an egg by his knee. 

“We need to go to the village.”

Reuben stares at the wall. “I’m not going.”

She’s quiet for a moment, but Reuben doesn’t say more. “What should I say to Yili?” She finally asks.

“That I’m sick,” he mutters. “In bed.” When she doesn’t accuse him of lying or insist that he come with her, he adds, a bit more clearly: “Please open the gate.”

He waits, until he hears the gate creak open and the chickens flap their wings.

All he hears after that are the sparrows in the trees; then later, the cicadas; the leaves rustling -then the crickets chirp as the night falls. 

He stays on his side all evening and all night. Before the sun rises, he moves his aching muscles to crawl out and piss in a corner, then drink some water at the bell. 

When Andrea decides to check on him, she finds him like she did the day before, turned on his side, away from her. 

“The things you’re growing are going to die,” she tries this time -a striking statement to make after only two days.

Opening his eyes, he first thinks her words come from his dream. He doesn’t pause to ask himself why she’d care, he doesn’t turn around to see if she’s really here or not. “Let it,” is all he says in return.

Soon his neck is stiff, but he doesn’t leave the coop. When a chicken grooms his hair, he doesn’t stir. When several hop on his thigh to perch on the roost for the third night, he doesn’t open his eyes. 

For hours he’s too numb to move but he’s awake nonetheless, his eyes tracing imaginary lines in the dark. In the middle of the night, when the sky is the darkest, he breathes a bit slower to better hear the distant call of an owl. 

Right then, in the silence, the faint, familiar creak of the gate behind him follows it, and Reuben’s breath falters. 

Eyes open in the dark, he doesn’t move an inch, waiting, but he doesn’t hear anything else.  _ A spirit nudged the gate open _ , he’s eager to think --until he feels another kind of presence; the imperceptible sound of a naked foot in the grass. 

She’s being quiet, but the night is quieter. Another step in the soft grass, and he’s holding his breath.

He listens out, but for a moment all he hears are a few crickets. He does catch something; a shadow in the shadow; what he understands later is the shadow of her hand. 

That hand blindly finds his shoulder in the dark, awkward, startling his heart into a new pace -yet he manages not to move. The touch is fleeting; soon the cold tips of her fingers brush the side of his neck in her search, and Reuben quickly shuts his eyes. 

The warmth comes before the contact; her thumb grazes his brow, her palm about to cover his eyes before it moves just so… to cup his forehead as lightly as she can.

Checking for a fever he doesn’t have, she makes no sound while he pretends to sleep. Then the warmth leaves him. She’s gone.

Long after she leaves he still feels the ghost of her touch. His face burns in the dark; he can’t breathe, and he can’t move, not even to wipe his eye with the back of his hand or hide his face. 

It’s a long wait until dawn. He doesn’t sleep, and by the time his chickens jump to the ground one after the other, he’s on his hands and knees, head low. He’s crawling out of the coop. 

Kneeling in the early morning, he looks up and finds what he’s hated to look at for so long, the first years he lived here. It stands on the other side of the forest, after the trees, up north -the mountain. His eyes don’t leave the orange peak. 

It’s a five hour walk to reach its foot. Reuben knows that, because he remembers walking for six hours or so the first and last time he went there with Han. He was thirteen years old and still living with him; and it’s the only time Han talked to him about Leia. 

The decision is easily made. 

Back inside the cabin, despite a persistent lack of appetite, Reuben breaks the leftover bread in pieces, so he can push some inside a jar full of summer’s last tomatoes. He puts it away in the bag he always takes to the river, then fills his canteen at the well.

The morning dew is still on the grass, and Andrea is nowhere to be seen. But it’s alright. 

Without further delay, he starts walking.

This is a straightforward pursuit; he can’t lose sight of where he’s going this time. The mountain is unchanging like nothing else in life is. 

The forest is dense for three hours or so while he walks further away still from the village. The air is fresh enough to cool his face while the ground subtly slopes upward, until he finds the north arm of the river; his first stop.

There, he kneels by the water and washes his face, gasping. He removes his shoes and dips both feet in the water to prevent swelling; he holds his canteen against the stream, then drinks all he can. 

The bread, soaked in tomato juice, is gobbled down with the rest in a few minutes. After rinsing his hands and face again, putting everything in the bag, he’s up and crossing the river, his shoes in hand. From there, he has to walk for two more hours to get what he’s looking for.

Past the river, trees stand further and further apart, until there aren’t any to shelter him from the sun. The soil soon becomes dark orange, and it’s all sand and rocks the longer he moves uphill.

Old tales about the mountain bears waiting to swallow a man whole the first chance they get come back to him the more he progresses.

Han, who had never seen one, was terrified of them, and Reuben was warned every day as a child by the elders that if he ever went to the mountain he’d meet the  _ black ones _ ; his soul would be eaten with his flesh; and he’d spend eternity on earth trapped inside the skin of a bear. 

No one in the village denies their existence, even though Reuben has never known of anyone going to the mountain -with the exception of his father and himself.

Because of this, Reuben’s heart stutters when a rock rolls down nearby. But at no point does he change his mind, nor does he slow down. 

He doesn’t find what he came for when he expects to find it, so he keeps walking; and when the mountain is all he can see, when it takes up all the sky, he thinks he remembered it all wrong; that it’s the wrong season, the wrong place; that his father never took him here, that Han never told him anything about Leia, that he’s made it all up in his head. Yet, he keeps walking. 

Soon after, he comes to a stop, right there under the sun. 

There they are, cascading over the larger rocks; in fact, they’re everywhere. Leia’s flowers. 

Every year, when the days are long and chickens run in the grass after supper, Reuben thinks of those flowers. They grow for about a month, on the south face of the mountain; and if they grow somewhere else, Reuben doesn’t know. He would never find any in the forest is for certain; not enough sun, and the air is too humid there. They don’t like that.

They’re nothing pretty, their heads small and purple, the stems woody at the base, the smell of their leaves more unpleasant than not. They’re exactly like he remembers them. 

Reuben kneels by the first bush, and opens his bag. 

Next to it, he lays down a large, clean cloth, then gets his pocket knife to cut each stem and align the flowers neatly. He moves to another bush when he’s done with the first one, then another, and another, until he has enough to fill one of his jars at home. 

It takes him a few minutes, no more. The cloth is wrapped around the flowers, the flowers put away in his bag; he doesn’t linger to look at the view. The sun has nearly reached its zenith when he starts walking again.

He stops at the river on the way back, grateful for the shade and the water, but otherwise doesn’t pause, his thighs and his lower back aching after walking downhill. 

At no point does he entertain changing his mind, from the moment he leaves the coop until late in the afternoon when he’s finally crossing the field and sees the cabin, his hair matted with sweat under his straw hat.

He’s reached the well, about to remove his hat and pour water over his head, feeling his face burn -when Andrea appears on the side of the cabin, walking to the front her head down, seeming lost in thought; until she sees him. 

Eyes opening wide, she stops right there and throws her hands up. 

“ _ Where were you?!! _ ”

Her anger rises in a blink, and he’s dumb, standing there; but there’s no point in saying anything anyway, because she lifts a hand up to stop him, immediately backtracking: “I don’t care where you go. But you better tell me when you leave!” 

Confused, he innocently asks: “What could you possibly need me for?”

As if the mere sound of his voice was an insult to her, she shouts louder still. “I don’t need a thing from you!! Just tell me when you leave and when you’ll be back!!”

“Why?”

“ _ Because! _ ” 

He doesn’t have the energy to match her fury, but a body weary from walking all day is a good soil for frustration to grow. “What difference does it make to you?” He asks again.

“Yilimae would want to know if something happened!”

“I’ve gone fishing all morning without telling you before, and what?”

She thinks she caught him in a lie, then, because she points a finger at him: “You didn’t go fishing today--”

“You weren’t even here this morning--” 

“The rod is inside!”

“You don’t tell me when  _ you _ leave,” he raises his voice, coming closer to accuse her right back. “Where were  _ you _ ?”

Incredibly, it’s enough for her to falter. “This morning?”

“This morning! Early this morning.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” she stammers, “so I went for a walk!” 

“Well I went for a walk too!”

“...After hiding in the coop for  _ two days _ !”

Shame washes over him, but he pretends to ignore it, their voices rising with every word. “It’s my home here, I’ll hide wherever I want to-”

“Do what you want--”

“You took my bed and I have to sleep somewhere-”

“But don’t leave all day without warning!”

“I left for a few hours, so?”

“You left  _ all day _ !”

“Why do you care!”

“I don’t care!!”

“Then why scare the birds away with your screaming?”

At the top of her lungs, her fists tight, her voice echoing across the field -she screams. 

_ “I’m not scaring the fucking birds away!” _

The cicadas around them stop singing at once. She waits for another retort, panting, but he pinches his lips tightly to keep from speaking, his knuckles cracking. 

He lets out a sharp, dismissive sigh instead, and heads to the porch without another word, passing her. 

It’s unclear to him what she’s offended by, but she follows him, seeming to shake with pent-up anger still. As he gets to the porch, she stops at the bottom of the steps and quickly warns, looking up at him:

“You said you’ll ask Yili to break the union. Don’t you go back on your word.”

“I won’t. Honor is all I have,” he starts -but he snarls the rest at her before he can stop himself. “---and I can’t wait for you to be out of my life again.” 

Andrea steps back with a flinch, the same way she would if a door had slammed in her face.

It’s too fleeting and unexpected for him to react in time; she immediately turns around and starts walking away from him. 

The pang in his chest is sudden, and it vexes him all the more; but all he thinks of doing is yell some more after her. 

“Well? Where are you going, huh? ...When will you be back?!”

At that, she starts running. He huffs, his hands trembling, his throat tight.

The door swings open when he kicks it. He throws his jacket and the bag on the woodpile, the jar clunking through the fabric but luckily not breaking. He tries to take a deep breath, pacing, but he swears to himself instead and returns on the porch to see where she is: far, far away in the field already.

Andrea baked a fresh loaf of bread this afternoon; he finds it wrapped in a cloth on the stove. As if to get revenge, he tears it in half and shoves all he can in his mouth, hurting his jaw. Then he immediately sits down, nauseous, and pushes it away from him. 

Fruitless thoughts go rampant in his head like snakes swallowing their tails, and he can’t sit still. For an hour, that’s about all he does, his shirt sticking to the skin of his back, itching. 

Later, he washes his face above the bucket on the porch, glancing up a few times at the field. Sitting back inside, his jaw clicks every time he clenches it too hard, and his entire body is sore, so he eventually hides his face in his arms on the table, closing his eyes for a moment only. 

He jumps awake some time later, when the door opens. 

Andrea is a dark form moving against the light; Reuben barely has time to blink his eyes open that she’s rushed to her bedroom. 

Rising to his feet, his mind still foggy from sleep, he does hesitate now. He should have removed his shoes, he thinks in his confusion; his feet and his lower back are throbbing; but then his attention narrows to the silence on the other side of the wall.

He takes a step on the side as if to go around the table and follow her, but he stops himself; he opens his mouth to speak, then shuts it. His eyes fall on his bag on the woodpile. 

As if any sound from him would prompt her to leave again, he slowly crosses the room trying to be quiet and takes it. 

Quietly still, he unties it and gets the tightly wrapped flowers out of it to lay them there on the table. 

Seeing those flowers in his home, with Andrea so close to see them, what he’s doing suddenly hits him. For a moment he stands there, the flowers in front of him, and words don’t come. He has to force them out. 

“Since you so badly want to know, I went to the mountain today.”

He doesn’t expect he’ll get a response, but he still bites the inside of his cheek waiting for her to speak. 

“I went to pick flowers,” he says, careful. “They’re beautiful and I’m sure you’ve never seen anything like it.”

“I don’t care.”

The sudden sound of her voice in the cabin disarms him. “Well good,” he mutters, “They’re ugly.”

He swallows, wiping a palm on his thigh. “I was looking for a flower my father told me about. To chase spirits away. I don’t know if I found the right ones.”

He needs that simple bait to be enough, or he’ll have to make her listen when she doesn’t want to, and he knows for sure that this would be the wrong way to go about this. 

In any case, the cabin stays silent. Praise is his last resort. 

“You know much more about plants than I do. Come have a look and tell me if you know about this one.”

He stays put, hopeful even if he should know better; but the silence stretches on. He searches for better words, meaning to admit he regrets saying what he’s said to her, when he hears movement on the other side of the wall. 

He can’t say if she’s coming, her steps don’t seem to come closer at first, and Reuben thinks she might just go out the door anyway. 

But she appears, right there by the wall. 

Hands at her sides, mouth in a hard line; not quite looking at him. Her dress got caught somewhere, because he spots a tear above the hem. 

Even though curiosity clearly prevailed over her pride, she looks over at the flowers with a calculated air of disinterest. 

He stays on the other side of the table, holding a corner of the cloth, showing them to her. 

She takes a step closer, her eyes on them, then another one. She picks a flower up, then drops it back onto the others, pursing her lips. 

“No,” she concedes. “I’ve never seen those.”

Quickly, before there’s any chance he loses the courage to speak, he says, avoiding her eyes: “I lied. They're useless against dark spirits."

Even without looking directly at her, he can pinpoint the moment when she gets annoyed, at the way her hand moves; annoyed that she can’t help but be curious, that he has her attention. Yet, her voice is small when she asks him.

"What are they for then?"

“You leave them to dry for a few days,” he stalls. “They dry faster than most plants, it’s quickly done. Then you put them in a jar. Fill it with oil. Could be any type of oil,” he adds lower. 

When he looks up, Andrea is looking right back at him. She’s not  _ annoyed _ anymore. He’s acting strange, he knows it, and she senses something is wrong. 

“You seal the jar and leave it under a cloth for a month,” he continues, his tongue heavy; a flower in his hand. “Remove the flowers… Keep the oil. Take no more than a spoonful of it when needed.” 

“And?”

If anyone came to know what Reuben is about to tell his wife, he imagines the elders would force him to leave the land completely, never to return. The people who’ve called him evil would rejoice. After all these years, he would simply prove them right. 

He’s holding the stem between his fingers. The one flower missing from Andrea’s notebook. 

“And if you’re a woman, it’ll make you bleed,” he simply says.

The minute, hesitant shift in Andrea is not easily caught. To anyone looking through the window, it would seem like nothing is happening. 

But the longer she remains quiet, struck, the less he feels capable of moving at all himself. 

Timid, her lips part, and he hears a faint “Huh?” coming from her finally. 

“A teaspoon of it will make a woman bleed,” he says again. “No matter what.”

He watches as her eyes fall back on the flowers, her hands slowly balling into fists and opening again. 

Andrea knows as well as he does that if anyone heard about this taking place, that if anyone heard this flower even exists and that  _ Reuben _ brought it back from the  _ mountain _ , the whole village would want their blood. 

Susu, like any self-respecting healer, most likely knows about this flower, but Reuben will never know for sure, because he will never ask her. 

The horror he’s felt for years at the thought of his secret being discovered, despite never returning to that mountain until today, crawls back from the shadows with ease. The danger is greater today, in fact, because that secret is now  _ hers _ as well. 

But Reuben regrets nothing, and he feels no shame. He would do it again, even if fear and distrust is all he finds in Andrea’s eyes. 

“I know what you’re trying to do,” she says low, as if someone was listening in. She looks ready to run away from him again. 

He tries to speak softly, in the hopes that it’ll mean anything to her that he’s trying. 

“And what is that?” 

“You’re trying to trick me.”

“How so?”

Silence follows, and Andrea’s eyes are on the flowers again. She swallows, but doesn’t leave. “Who… How do you know--”

“My mother didn’t want a baby,” he easily reveals. 

Han knew about this flower because Leia did. How Leia was made aware of its existence, Reuben doesn’t know. 

Andrea’s level look at him, then, says enough about what she thinks of that. “A potent flower, I see.” 

“It is potent,” he counters, unbothered by the sarcasm. He falters, however, when the moment comes to explain why he’s here at all, if his mother didn’t want him -settling for: “She changed her mind.” 

He holds back a wince, looking at the flowers between them. 

If Andrea cared to hear it, he supposes he could tell her the whole story, the one Han told him in the mountain, when he was thirteen. 

He could tell her that Leia took a spoonful of that oil every month for years, long before and after his parents’ union was celebrated. 

She didn’t want a child; Han wanted Leia to himself; they were content with each other the way they were, and life would have been easy if strangers, neighbors, their families and the elders hadn’t taken turns praying for them, questioning their diet and their methods, asking them why Leia wasn’t yet with child, coming to their doors with concerns that would often turn into veiled accusations and insults. 

_ A crowd impossible to stop, _ Han had said about them,  _ as if driven by dark forces to hurt your mother.  _

Reuben could tell Andrea that, when Han took him to the mountain, he was too young to hear what his father was really telling him. He convinced himself that his mother had died because the darkness had claimed her; that her death was his parents’ punishment for having ever picked that flower instead of leaving it alone. 

With Wilo desperate to be a mother, he never had to believe any different. 

In the end, he only says the most important part. “I’ve thought for a long time that this flower led dark spirits into my home. I don’t think so anymore.”

He doesn’t let himself think too long about his parents, and looks on his left. There is some room he could use to let the flowers dry on the shelf, unless he lays them on the chest in the bedroom instead. 

“...And it grows in the mountain,” he hears her repeat, as if to herself.

She’s staring at the flowers, transfixed, but her hands stay at her side. She makes no move to take a closer look despite obviously wanting to.

He nods, reaching up to move two of his bowls from the shelf. He means to speak clearly, but his words drop to a murmur: “If you want me to, I’ll draw you a map.”

She’s not so shy; as guarded as he’s known her to be, she cuts right to the chase. Her voice is flat, deliberately so, but her eyes don’t leave him. 

“Why are you doing this?”

“Doing what?”

“Why are you telling me about this?” 

He faces her again, cautious. 

“I couldn’t hide this from you any longer if I wanted to... Not while knowing you’ve been looking for those flowers for so long.”

No one in their right mind would do anything else but deny this. But Andrea does it so poorly, her voice is so weak, she might as well not speak at all. “I haven’t been looking for anything.” She shifts, as if to take a step back; but she doesn’t leave. 

“Yes, you have.”

He hesitates for a second, then quietly says the rest. 

“I’ve known since the day you fell sick to the point that you couldn’t leave the bed, Andrea. I could tell that you’d eaten something wrong. You'd been refusing to eat anything I was serving you for days, remember?”

She doesn’t speak, whether to deny it or stop him, which is good enough for him to keep going. 

“I first thought hunger had led you to be careless, out there in the forest, but,” he thinks back on those first days, explaining softly, “You seemed to know so  _ much _ . About plants. With your jars. Your  _ writing _ . It seemed unlikely that you’d eat whatever you found on your way, a plant or a fruit you knew nothing about… Unless you meant to. To see for yourself what it’d do to you.”

He pauses. Andrea is paralysed, and he tells himself that she must know he wouldn’t hurt her with this, surely, or she would have left. Still he hesitates again, his heart beating loud, finding himself fearing that one wrong word will make her hate him; more so than she already does. 

"And I know that you’ve been married to twelve men. It means I know you refused all of them,” he reminds her, to conclude: 

“What other plant could you possibly have been waiting to taste… if not for this one?”

It’s getting darker outside; the details of her face are harder to make out, but her eyes seem to shine, and she lowers them. His heart is in his throat.

“Andrea.” She looks up when he says her name. “...You'd leave the cabin for hours. Wasn’t it what you were doing? Searching the forest for that flower?”

The question doesn’t need an answer, and the silence before she speaks is a long one. 

She sniffles, wiping her nose with her sleeve. “I was searching the forest for,” she clears her throat, “...a spot to relieve myself in peace, actually.” 

He can’t help it; a slow smile tugs at his lips at that. Having nothing more to say, he carefully folds the cloth, deciding to leave her alone. 

She stands there in the middle of the room while he moves the flowers to the chest, watching him. 

“What if I told Yili about this?” She asks while he lays the flowers properly, in her bedroom. “What if you could never live in the village again?”

That she’s confused about his reasons doesn’t matter to him much. 

What matters is that  _ he’s _ not confused anymore. Not even a bit. 

Without looking at her, he simply says:

  
  


“I’ll never live in the village again. They’ll never let me.

  
  


You’ve told me so yourself.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you’re all safe and well. I read all your comments many, many times between updates. Never hesitate to leave one
> 
> [Oh, when I lift you up](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sIHEd_qiac)  
> You feel  
> Like a hundred times yourself  
> I wish everybody knew  
> What's so great about you 
> 
> Oh, but your love is such a swamp  
> You don't think before you jump,  
> And I said I wouldn't get sucked in

**Author's Note:**

> I have a [tumblr](https://ao3animal.tumblr.com/) and a [twitter](https://twitter.com/ao3animal)  
> If you enjoy this story and are looking for more infos, you can find links in my twitter bio. I hope you’re all well during these difficult times and that you’re taking care of yourselves. I love you, see you for the next one.


End file.
